First World Championships for Ontario’s Lia Wieckowski
Lia Wieckowski is a 19-year-old competition climber based in southern Ontario and currently attending university. Over the past few comp seasons in Canada, she has placed first at four events and made top six at 14. At the Vail World Cup, she placed 40th in Open Female and at the Guangzhou World Cup in China this November, Wieckowski finished 22nd in Junior Lead and 16th in Junior Boulder.
Wieckowski has been competing for four years and her home gym is Climber’s Rock. While she has been a force on the local scene, the Vail World Cup was her first international event. When asked about what she enjoys about competing outside of Canada, she said, “Getting to compete against the world’s best climbers, getting to go somewhere new and having the chance to climb really fun problems.”
For the World Championships in China, she made sure the problems she trained on were similar to the World Cup problems. Like many top climbers, she would run through mock comps trying to simulate the real thing. Competing at your first international championships can be stressful. When asked about how the China World Championships went, Wieckowski said, “It was really fun for me, I didn’t know where I was at compared to all those strong climbers around me, so I was just excited to see how I did. I didn’t notice too many people seeming really stressed.”
Wieckowski advanced to Semis in both Bouldering and Lead. “Qualifications were lots of fun especially in Boulder for me,” she said. “I got three flashes which I wasn’t expecting to do at all so knowing I was doing well made it even more fun. Semis for lead was very difficult and progressive, I definitely had to fight for some of the moves before I fell. Semis for Bouldering were probably the hardest comp problems I have ever tried. All the problems were very physically tiring and there were no gimme moves.”
The weather in China was never consistent and climbers had to adapt to the hot and cold snaps. “The weather changed a lot while we were there and it was all outdoors so I learned a lot about how to warm up in 30 degrees and then 12 degrees and raining the next day and how to deal with that,” said Wieckowski. It rained so hard one day, the organizers cancelled Qualifications for the Male Boulder round and everyone advanced to Semis.
To celebrate her first World Championships, Wieckowski treated herself to deep fried french toast with peanut butter in the middle dipped in melted white chocolate and peanut M&Ms. And when it comes to the 2016/17 comp season back in Ontario, “I will compete at the Ontario Boulder Provincials and Boulder Open Nationals, and hopefully I’ll get to do some Tour de Blocs as well.”
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