Alex Puccio, who has won many World Cups, has said she is not going to attempt to make the cut for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
While many comp climbers will be focusing on Lead and Speed to balance their bouldering skills, some will focus only on bouldering and will continue to dominate at the World Cups.
It will be interesting to see if the climbers who only focus on bouldering and bow out of an Olympics will rise to the top of the field or remain there.
Long post! Over the past 5-6 months I have been consistently thinking about the direction I want to take in my climbing career and where my heart truly lies. The decision I was faced with is to try or not to try for the Olympics. Mentally this has been very though for me, going back and forth with my thoughts. At first I said “YES, I want to try!” BUT then after some time I kept feeling like I maybe didn’t want to go down that road. I started to realize that I wanted to push for the Olympics because it sounded pretty cool and that I had always done competitions so I might as well. But then I stared to listen to my heart and mind a bit more and realized that I wasn’t really into training for Speed and Lead. I still love competing, BUT I also LOVE climbing outside! I truly believe that if I was going to make the push for the Olympics then starting now I wouldn’t be able to climb outside that much this year, maybe a few days here and there. And then if you made the Olympic Team it would be another 6 months on top of that. This is because you would have to train your a** off for all 3 disciplines. If the Olympic format was individual disciplines then I would have loved to try for it! I strongly believe that the main reason I have had such a long competition career and still going is because for the past 4 years I mainly climb outside and a couple weeks before a comp I’ll go in the gym to practice some comp style boulders. It has been working for me physically and most importantly MENTALLY! 🙂 I’m just about 30 years old and I don’t feel like taking up another discipline, speed, and giving up my LOVE for climbing outside for such a long time. Sure, if someone handed me a ticket to the Olympics I would LOVE to go and it would be so much fun I bet, but that’s not how it works. Lol ? Even tho it sounds amazing to go, I honestly don’t think I would love or enjoy the process of training to get there. Maybe if it’s in the Olympics after, with individual disciplines, I will go for it! I also had to make sure that I wasn’t not going for it out of fear of failure. This was VERY important to me! I’ll continue what I have been doing and love, Rock and Competing!
A post shared by Alex Puccio (@alex_puccio89) on Jan 18, 2019 at 10:17am PST
