It’s a few days now since Adam Ondra left the country and the dust has finally settled. Not so in the KSP office though where the requests for photographs, reports and comments from around the globe continue to come in to my inbox where there’s a wee backlog building up...

Helping to break big stories is an undeniable buzz and boy, did Ondra’s visit turn out to be big! I’ve resisted the urge to sex-up the headline on this blog entry but driving around this week (driving is when I mull these things over) some interesting one-liners have been floating around in my head: “King Wad slays UK’s hardest routes”..., or perhaps “Ondra: he came, he saw, he conquered”... or even “Czech Mate”... Ouch - that last one could go horridly wrong!

In the end I decided to keep it simple (stupid...) with a plain old “Didn’t he do well?”. And didn’t he just!

Here’s Ondra’s Scorecard...

And here’s Ondra’s W.I.P./Dropped/Sandbagged...

W.I.P. = Work in Progress

So who else, I wonder, could match a work rate that produced two F9a’s in 3 days and a total of nine 8^th grade on-sights in a week whilst working an F9a+ and narrowly missing out on on-sights of a further F8c, an F8b and an F8a+? Not many I’d suggest.

But as impressive as Ondra’s ticklist was however, it was his tax-list, ie those routes he didn’t complete or dropped, that I think gives an insight into the climbing here in the UK; so wit:

·        Overshadow: hard for grade [F9a+], possibly F9b

·        No on-sights harder than F8b – this from a guy who has on-sighted F8c+ overseas

So what conclusion should we draw and what, I wonder, is Steve McClure thinking about following Ondra’s visit? Well, I have an idea, but I guess we’ll have to wait for his comments till his next column in CLIMB…

Steve McClure - a.k.a King Wad (UK) - on the crux of Overshadow (F9a+) which is still un-repeated. The image captures the body tension and strength required to operate at the highest levels in today’s sport climbing theatre...