An Interview with IFSC Routesetter Ryan Sewell

Innsbruck intel, IFSC nomination process, "American Style", and more...

Before you read:

This is a long interview. There is a lot of valuable information here and I wanted to maintain a sense of this being a conversation. Read it in parts, read it over dinner, or read it with a drink (apologies for any typos, this was a long one). Enjoy.

EP: Thank you for joining Ryan, for those that don't know you, could you give a brief introduction, and outline some of your setting experience?

RS: My name is Ryan Sewell. I have been setting since about the age of 14 and I am 34, so I’ve been setting for 20 years. I got my start setting for free in a gym back in the early 2000s when I was on a youth team. I’d mostly just put tape on holds and call it a boulder. I started setting for competitions not much after that. In 2006 or 2007 I set my first local, which would now be a USAC QE. I opted to wash holds and set one boulder in a red point comp instead of compete.

I did my first USAC bouldering divisionals in 2009 and then started setting national level events in 2014. I set my first World Cup in 2019 as a national setter for the
Vail World Cup and then went through the IFSC selection process as a nomination from USA Climbing in 2023.

EP: How many World Cups have you set for? Lead and boulder respectively. People that know you tend to think of you as a lead specialist. How do you feel about this designation, and would you like to set boulders more? Or less?

RS: I've set 3 bouldering World Cups, Vail in 2019, Salt Lake City in 2021 and 2022, and I've set three lead World Cups. Koper and Briançon in 2024, and I just recently set Innsbruck in 2025. In 2 months I’ll be traveling to set the World Championships in Korea which will be my 4^th lead event.

Am I a bit more of a lead specialist? I think that's how I've been captured, mostly because I've climbed a lot of lead routes outside. I've competed in lead comps. I've also competed in boulders and climbed a lot of boulders outside, but not as many setters are doing the sport climbing track. I think when you find someone who is a sport climber on their own volition and a route setter, then the probability that you will get pushed into that path is higher. Would I like to set more boulders? Yeah.

EP: Do you think that it's more difficult to set ropes and that's why people avoid it? Why do you think fewer people go with the lead track?

RS: To me, bouldering at a World Cup level is more difficult because the moves themselves are much more challenging. The amount of climbing that you're doing is significantly more than in lead. However, the probability of things not going as you would expect are higher in lead. It’s a higher risk of failure or lower probability of success, however you want to look at it.

Boulders can get climbed 50 times and changed after each try. Plus there's four boulders in every round, except for qualifiers where there's five. In ropes, a lead route might get climbed six times maybe, and that's if you're lucky. 4 is probably closer to the standard. You might be hanging for 10 minutes while tweaks are getting made, then you pull on, do that one move, and think it's good in isolation, but 15 athletes fall on that move. Then the entire route becomes a failure. So, I don't think bouldering is harder or easier than lead. I think they're different and physically bouldering to me is more demanding.

EP: It translates a little bit more into a risk reward thing you would say?

RS: I wouldn't call it risk. The mistakes that you might make in lead are much more impactful than if you make one mistake in boulder. We have plenty of boulders all the time that get no tops, right? Nobody looks sideways at that. If you have one route where five people top, it's a big deal.

EP: We’ll get into that a little bit later.

RS: That's ok, it's part of my coping mechanism to talk about it.

EP: You have to control the narrative, you know?

RS: Yeah, trying to at least.

EP: Historically, there's only been a few American routesetters on the officials list for international events, the ones that come to mind are Chris Danielson, Garrett Gregor, Brad Weaver, Flannery Shay-Nemirow, and now you.

What do you think separated you from other routesetters during the selection process? Would you be able to detail the selection a bit more?

RS: We'll start from the end and work our way back to the beginning. When the IFSC was looking at the pool of route setters, they used to have a different system where there were a select number of certified setters. They also had a juniors program where people would move into the program and eventually progress into being a tenured IFSC route setter. They recently (two years ago) moved to a level system like USA Climbing.

There are four levels. Level 4 is you're a World Cup Head Setter. You could set the Olympics. You can do everything that you could think of. Level 3 is my level, which is an international route setter. You're an IFSC setter. I think you can Head set Continental events and then you can set World Cups/World Championships. Level 2 is a continental route setter and level 1 is a national preferred route setter.

They developed this new system and everyone got placed into their requisite levels. New setters were added into levels 1-3. Level 4 was pretty much set. It was mostly the existing IFSC setters.

So how do you get to that point where you are put into one of these levels? When they created this new system, IFSC accepted nominations from every national federation and national federations were able to nominate. Two people at each level 1, 2 and 3. You weren't able to nominate anybody for level 4. You were allowed to nominate a third person if one of the three people was not male identifying (ex. 2 males 1 female, 2 males 1 nonbinary).

All the national federations had to put forth their nominations. In the case of USA Climbing, that was done through the route setting committee, but also through John Muse, the VP of Sport. Almost all the people on the routesetting committee wanted to be nominated so they were removed from most of the process. John Muse was the one who made the final decision on all the people that were going to be nominated at each level.

Once that went to IFSC, every person that USA climbing nominated had to create a CV. The CV was prescriptive in terms of the information that they wanted to know. The majority of it was based around climbing level, national setting experience, international experience, and age.

If you didn't have any international experience, you wouldn’t be selected. If you didn't climb at a certain level, you wouldn't be selected. The focus for the IFSC has been getting the entire pool of route setters younger and more capable of doing what the athletes can do. Whether that's right or wrong or good or not, I can't speak to, but it is the IFSC's goal.

Some of the folks before me, like Garrett and Brad, went through the junior program. Before the junior program existed, there was an IFSC route setter certification course that you could just go and take. That doesn't exist anymore, but I believe that's how Chris Danielson got into it.

EP: You mentioned a little bit, but what are some of the things you think separated you from the other candidates? I'm assuming every person that could applied for this, and two to three people is like a pretty slim list.

RS: The primary one would be years of experience setting USAC events. My first national event was 2014, but I did set the GoPro Citizens Comp in 2010, which is technically a national event. Once I reached 2018, I had been a multiple time chief setter for national level events. I had set all the national level events I could as an L4, which progressed into me advancing to L5.

After achieving that, I was a top candidate to set our international World Cup in Vail and SLC, which is where I gained my international experience. Every single World Cup that happens, the National Federation is responsible for providing anywhere from one to five route setters (depending on budget/other restrictions), so you get those opportunities through USA Climbing.

Additionally, Mike Bockino had set up some exchanges between other national federations. There was one with Japan that Ian McIntosh did in 2018 or 2019 where he went to Japan and the Japanese federation sent a setter over to our World Cup in Salt Lake or in Vail at the time. For me, I had an exchange with Japan in 2023. I went to a rural part of Japan and set their National team combined selection event.

EP: That’s information that a lot of people don't necessarily know. They don't understand how many national and international events you need to take part in to end up in this position.

I think a lot of the time people will just see somebody and they're like, oh, who is this guy? Where did he come from? It's rare to get the whole story.

EP: There is a stigma around American route setting and route setters generally being behind in skill and specializing in “power style”. I think some of that comes from the fact that there were not a lot of American route setters present at international events in the past.

Have you experienced this stereotype at all when setting internationally, and how have you dealt with that?

RS: Yeah, I have. I think it's a good thing to have an emphasis on styles for bouldering events.

There's five qualifier boulders, four semi boulders and four finals boulders. Having a style is good because everybody has their own preference in movement. Some setters prefer static, others dynamic, and their differences in hold choice/aesthetic. It comes down to these choices that create a diverse round.

For instance, the first World Cup I set in Vail, there was myself, another American setter (who set much differently than me), a Japanese setter, and a French setter. This led to having a very stylistically balanced round of four boulders because we had all these distinct styles from across the world.

There are two differences for lead. The first is you set with another person on a lift on a competition route, so your styles get muddied and mixed no matter what. It's not as polarizing. However, in qualifiers it is more common for an individual to set a route.

At Innsbruck there was a men's qualifier set by a Japanese setter. It was the apex of what you would think when you're thinking Japanese style. Fairly wide in the shoulders, wide feet, a lot of body tension, always engaged, bad holds, no resting positions and a slightly scattered aesthetic without clustering. When you watch it climb, it functions well, and it is highly effective. Good route, but super Japanese style.

For my qualifier route, the Japanese setter described it as very American style. It is what it is. I think we should always try to enhance our skills and be less singular in our style, but we can't run away from the reality that we have one.

EP: I like this perspective a lot. Variety is the spice of life, a homogeneous style would not be good for the setters, spectators, or the athletes.

What has been the hardest thing about transitioning into the World Cup international circuit for you?

RS: I think if I'm answering personally, it's the amount of travel and logistics around my own family life. I have two young kids and my job at Movement is full on. I'm responsible for a lot of things, which is awesome, but now the addition of traveling and dealing with time zones while staying connected is not easy.

For events themselves, the hardest thing is going to an event as somebody that knows a lot about what they’re doing. Then you meet a bunch of people who also know a lot about what they're doing. However, most of the time, you may not have worked with them before. You show up and immediately on day one, while you're jet lagged, you get into a lift, work with somebody who you've never worked with before, and set the most important route for the event. You're trying to remember their name while simultaneously setting a finals route. This is inherently socially and professionally challenging, not to mention that the level of the World Cup athletes is beyond comprehension. It’s impossible to understand unless you climb on the routes and realize that you can’t hold something that they are casually clipping from.

EP: I like that you brought up the fact that a lot of the things are “intangibles”. There's all this social drain, travel drain, and then setting on top of that.

What has been the easiest thing in your transition?

RS: I think the easiest thing is that virtually all competitions are the same in terms of the flow. There's always a qualifier, semi, and then a final. The number of routes and the goal stays the same. We have to split 24 people in the semifinals, and eight in the final.

We've got to set two qualifiers, each one stylistically different, relatively similar in difficulty. We’re hoping for no more than five tops on any individual qualifier, hopefully no more than three athletes topping both. It's kind of formulaic. It's the same thing in bouldering as saying the perfect round is four tops for first, three tops for second, etc.

Understanding the event itself and what is happening is easy because you've done it for, in my case, almost 15 years. I also used to be a competitor at this level in the past, so I'm familiar with what all that stuff feels like and it's very second nature for me.

EP: The next couple of questions are Innsbrook specific. How long did you have to set the event? How much time did you spend on each round and how many total people were on the crew for lead?

RS: There were four people on the crew, one IFSC head setter, 2 IFSC route setters and one national delegation route setter. Additionally, there were two Austrian local gym (Kletterzentrum) based setters that would help us with forerunning and organizing/moving holds. When a modern route comes off the wall, it's like four or five pallets worth of materials, so it was immensely helpful to have them assisting in moving things around.

The schedule is really odd for Innsbrook lead. I left my house on June 5th, which means I arrived in Innsbrook on June 6th after the time change. We start setting the 7th through 11th. We set finals, we set semis, and we set qualities, and finished on the 11th

The 12th through the 25th, they are setting for a paraclimbing World Cup, a bouldering World Cup and Austrian National Championships, all happening at the same time with staggered setting and staggered event dates. There was a 14 day gap where all of these things were going on while we waited for the lead event. I was working remote, did some hiking around, and took a few days off.

Everyone on the team came back on the 26th and we had 1.5 days to put all the qualifier routes back on the wall, which you normally never have to do. Usually, qualifiers are set last and then the event happens, but the other event scheduling impacted this.

Qualifiers happen and are over by maybe 3:00 PM and then we have 4 hours to change over from qualifiers to semis because they do semis the same night. We get qualifiers down as fast as possible and then put the semifinals up. We don’t get any time to tweak or climb them.

Sunday morning we go in at 8:30am to take down the semi-final routes. It takes some time putting the finals back on the wall. It was epic because there's huge Rock City giga volumes that are custom designed to insert in different dihedrals on the lead wall. We had to put those back on and then install the remainder of the finals routes. When we’re finished, we have a window of 3-4 hours to forerun a bit and make final tweaks.

Circling back to the setting timeline, we had about a day and a half to set finals and get them off the wall. Then again about a day and a half to set semis and get them off the wall. We have two days to set and forerun the 4 qualifying routes.

Lifts and holds spread about pre-setting.

EP: That's a lot of work.

RS: 12-hour days, every day, maybe more.

EP: How did the chief run the setting for this competition? I know that there's differences in workflow. From listening to some previous interviews and our time talking, it seems like a good amount of it rides on how the chief is running things. Were there any nuances about the chief (Akito Matushima) for this event?

RS: As I was saying earlier, it's hard because you have all these people that are coming together that are massively experienced, all trying to collaborate on routes together.

You can't give the team no direction because then it's like chaos. And you can’t give them too much direction because then they’re inundated with constraints, and they're too good to be given a massive amount of constraints. Saying at the 4th bolt you need to set a jump, then after that it should be crimpy, and so on, is too much.

The IFSC head setters that I've worked with strike a balance. Which is, working together to identify what our core set of non-negotiables is. How many tops do we want? Do we want to jump or not? Do we want a resistance section or a dynamic section. That's usually defined by the head setter and presented to the setting team.

When I first arrived on the night of the 6^th we spent maybe an hour and a half talking about whether we should have the two lead routes cross each other? And if they did, how would we clip up draws and take off holds between the two genders climbing. We talked a lot about doing it, but we found out that we only had 10 minutes in-between the men's and women's final. We opted not to do it because of logistics, but it was a group discussion.

The same discussions were held for hold colors, hold brands being represented, and climbing lanes. In the case of Innsbruck, the lanes are the same every year. The head setter for this event gave us the right amount of constraints after having a conversation and collectively deciding.

That was for finals. For semis the constraints are a little tighter. You have 24 athletes; you have to split them. You could maybe put a jump in if you wanted, but it mostly needs to be full on resistance, and we need to try and just get separation.

Then for qualifiers the constraints tighten even more because there's two routes in balance. They can't be the same. You have one that's at a lower angle and more technical. The other is much more power resistance style because it's on a much steeper profile. Additionally, you have a desired number of tops for each route.

One thing that we talked about in our debrief was that it would’ve been beneficial to have a forerunning schedule. Any one of us could have recommended that, and nobody did. We were all asking, do you want to climb? Should I climb? And maybe some people who were feeling really tired were climbing, while other people who were feeling really fresh were sitting.

EP: I'm glad to hear there's a lot of collaboration. Even from watching it felt like there was a lot going on with the movement and aesthetics of each route.

Do you ever think that we’ll see the crossing routes? That sounds like a pretty cool idea.

RS: I do, but it would be hard in Innsbruck. Climbing in Innsbruck and Austria is so big that it's on their national television, so their timelines and schedule are super tight.

Every minute on the minute, there's something being accounted for. Whether it's this block of athletes, a commercial break, or a transition. In a different event space, maybe there would be more flexibility. If they were able to build an extra 15 minutes into the schedule it’s possible we could’ve done it.

EP: That's crazy that you guys even have like TV constraints.

RS: Yeah, the commercial breaks are pretty funny. When you’re watching the comp, you're like, why is nothing happening right now? Then you realize they’re on commercial break.

EP: Would you say that the structure of the qualifiers and semifinals being more resistance climbing and the finals being flashier is by design?

RS: Yeah, it's usually just a product of the number of athletes and what the objective is for that round. In the semifinals there were 24 athletes, and you've usually got about 50 moves on a route. You're not really going to drop anybody below move 15. Now you're looking at effectively 35 moves to try and separate 24 athletes. You need to do everything that you can to make the route sequential in terms of where people fall. The best way to do that and avoid bottlenecks is for the movement to be more resistance focused.

You can still have interesting things. We had this section in the men's semifinal with these blue and orange volumes where they did a little jump and then this weird gaston and while bicycling their feet and it was very 3D. After that it's pinch, pinch, pinch, crimp, crimp, back to resistance. The standard is based on what the objective of the round is. In finals you only have 8 athletes, which in our case I'm glad we didn't have 12 because then we might have seen 8 tops instead of 5. You can do a little bit more with 8 competitors because you have more opportunities for them to fall and separate themselves throughout the route.

Men’s (left) and Women’s (right) semi-finals routes.

EP: Everybody's going to want me to ask this is, how hard are the routes? What's the grade breakdown?

RS: I'll give you that answer, but first I'll tell you a story.

I think it was the day we were setting semi-finals, we had about 2/3 of the semifinal up. We came down because we needed to reload our resources. We sat at a little cafe opposite the wall. We're looking at the wall and talking about what to do while having espresso. A climber from the gym starts talking to me and asks, how'd you get here? What’s it like setting? How do you decide what to do? All the standard questions. And then he says he used to set at a gym in Germany a long time ago. He followed up by asking how hard you need to climb to set these (World Cup) routes. I told him to be honest, if you're not comfortable climbing on 8C route, which is 14B, it’s difficult to do anything here. He laughed at me. He said he thought for sure I was going to say 7A+ or 7B.

The physical demand of the climbing itself is such that you have to be pretty darn competent in what 8C feels like. As a baseline, most of the women's routes, especially when you have the likes of Janja, Ai, and Brooke are at least 8C. Sometimes 8C+, 14B/14C.

For the boys, I would say a standard is 14C, bordering upwards of getting close to 9A, 14D. In our case for the men's final in Innsbrook, I think it was probably 14B.

EP: It’s a stark reality of how good these athletes are now, and the level is only increasing. I appreciate your honesty with this because sometimes it's very hard to get people to give a straight answer.

RS: Of course. I will say, I tend to think of myself as somebody who can boulder or do moves on a route pretty consistently.

At this level, there were multiple clipping positions and resting positions that the athletes were able to find and take that I couldn't even entertain. There were moves I couldn't do. There were positions that I couldn't get in. I can't stress this enough. They're so good. It is dizzying to watch them climb.

EP: There's like a few times that we've had pro athletes at our local events in the past and it’s truly unbelievable to watch them and your perspective on climbing completely changes after watching them do something so easily that might’ve felt like your limit during forerunning.

How did you and the team feel after the completion of each round? Did the results affect any tweaks on the routes following each round? I know some of them you didn't even have time to change.

RS: I think the men's qualifier routes were like, half a notch, if you will, harder than we thought they would be. We ended up with only one top across the whole men's field in qualifiers, and we thought we might get 3-4. We went into the semifinals thinking the level was pretty close.

For women, we went through qualifiers with Janja topping both of the routes and 6 girls falling on the last move. This put Janja in 1st and then 6 girls all tied for 2nd. After that we felt a lot of pressure on the women’s semifinal. I don't think the team working on the women's semifinal made many changes. They might have tweaked up the top just a hair in one spot or another. There couldn’t be any major changes because we didn’t have time to climb it.

I worked on the men’s semifinal, and watching it was probably the most stressed I've ever been in my life. Yannick came out first and got into the very last section, like ten holds from the top.

We're thinking, oh no, it's way too easy. Then a few athletes fall lower; Megos doesn't climb super well, Sascha falls. About 5 athletes in Jesse Grupper is top minus, touching the finish hold. We're thinking it's going to be 12 tops for sure, and it's going to be awful. I'd never root for people to fall; I would always prefer them to have some success. In this case, I was so nervous that we were going to have 8,10,12 tops that when somebody fell, it was like the ultimate relief. It was like, “Oh thank God, we didn't screw it up that bad”.

At the end of that round, we had two guys who were top minus, Jesse and Toby. A few others fell in the top section. The competitor that would go on to win the event, Neo Suzuki, topped the route. In terms of results on paper and the drama of the show, we couldn't have possibly scripted it any better. We left the men’s semi final feeling really good, even if there was some luck involved.

On the women's side, we took that six-way tie and brought it down to a three-way tie.
Three of the six girls fell at different points, then the other three girls all fell on the same move. We were less psyched on the outcome of that route because there were a few little bottleneck sections, but overall, it was good and effective. You had separation from Janja and these other three girls.

So, you have mixed emotions, right? The men’s team was feeling, “holy cow, we crushed”. The women’s team was feeling “eh, we could have done better”.

Then we go into finals. I think the team on the women's side was thinking the route might be too hard. Janja likes hard routes and people know that, so they're much more accommodating when the route's a little too hard on the women's side. Janja is such a prolific climber and that's what she wants. It’s good to see what she's capable of.

The men’s side was as discouraging as you can imagine.

Yannick comes out first and climbs flawlessly. Great tempo, power when he needed it, slowed down when he needed to, executed. We're thinking, maybe he just had the best route of his life. Dohyun Lee comes out next and doesn’t climb well. He makes a lot of mistakes and falls. So, we're like, maybe we have a chance. Then the next athlete out also tops. It was tough, it was about as dejected as I've felt in my route setting career.

Finals routes, featuring custom built Rockcity multi-color volumes.

EP: I could only imagine how you were feeling. I've had my share of failures, but on a much smaller scale. To be fair, I thought both routes were incredibly entertaining. All the pocket switches on the men's and the dyno on women’s were really cool.

I think at the end of the day, people are obviously looking at the scoreboard. It becomes confusing to discern who is the winner.

It often falls on the route setters that you didn't produce a result. You could have put these athletes on a slightly harder route, or the same route, or a slightly easier route on a different day, and you don't know what's going to happen. Did you guys have any internal discussions as it was happening or right after that stuck with you?

RS: I'm sure that most people have felt this before at some point in their lives. But as it was happening, I wanted to leave. I wanted to just walk out of there. I was so embarrassed and frustrated that I didn’t want to be there. I knew I couldn’t do that. You have to own it. This is the work that you came here to do, it's not going how you want and that's how it goes sometimes. You get to sit there and be frustrated,
but don't be angry or have a bad attitude or whatever. Still have a smile. It's going to be what it is, and it sucks. That doesn't make any excuse to not be professional about it and to not take it on the chin.

In terms of your question and things that we talked about, I mean there's a lot of little things here and there that we could have done differently. I think some are pretty obvious; other ones are much more nuanced. One nuance would be balancing the conditions. When we were forerunning, we were climbing in the sun, and it was 92 degrees outside at the time. We were dripping with sweat. When the athletes competed in the men's final, it was 9:45 at night. Cool breeze, probably in the mid 70s. Anybody who's climbed outside can tell you it's not the same route, not the same boulder, when the conditions are bad.

We could have worked around that better. We could set the route earlier in the morning or started trying to set it at night and then climb early in the morning when conditions were better. We could have done something, but we were feeling really good about what we were doing and thought that qualifiers to the semi finals were good. So, semifinals to finals should also be good.

You mentioned this idea of wanting to do more spectacular things in the final than in the semi-final. I come back to the article that you wrote about bouldering. We’re always trying to set the new move, the new thing, something that just pushes routesetting forward. In our case, I felt like I got too focused on trying to do something that's interesting and cool to watch. That was more of a priority, even though I would have said in the moment it's not.

In hindsight, the priority was making sure that we didn't put good holds on the wall, that the athletes got pumped, and that the athletes fell because they were challenged and fatigued. Basically, on any route that goes on the wall for this level athlete, if there is a good hold, regardless of the sequence, you have to stop and ask yourself, does this hold really need to be this good for this to work? They will rest on anything. In fact, Neo, if you remember, rested on a two-finger pocket that was completely no-tex with a thumb catch before the 360 ghost hold section.

The fact that he's just sitting there, with no texture, and resting, on this pocket that we could barely hold on to with any confidence. If they are good holds, they just will demolish it no matter what the move is.

EP: It's such a fine line when you start setting in general, and the line only gets finer the higher up you go. I mean, even on the broadcast, that hold looked terrible.

There's been increasing expectations put on route setters to produce good results for the IFSC. Climbing has come into this larger lens. You mentioned that it's so huge it's on TV in Austria. From some things that I've discerned, I feel like this has come with stricter guidelines.

I think an obvious example is the expected bouldering styles now for each climb. I was reading through the info sheet and there's projected tops for boulders and routes with other details. Do you agree with the direction that this is pushing the route setting? Or do you feel like this is almost creating too much pressure?

RS: It's a really good question. I tend to not think as much about whether I agree or disagree and instead think about what the objective is and try to deliver it. With lead, I think the objective is fairly straightforward, and that hasn’t changed. If you were to quantify it and say, I think this person gets one top (100%), then the one after has (95%), then you have (90%). All the percentages would probably say something similar to the document you’re referring to.

What I would like to see is, and this is just my own opinion, I would like to see each individual event be more of its own flavor. Both in terms of the terrain and the setting. I think back to Kranj in Slovenia. It was on this old stucco wall in a gym that's not very tall and the routes cut across the whole wall. It was different and that's why it’s memorable to me. In fact, the old Briançon wall was similar and 60 degrees steep for a long stretch. If you think back to the early days of the Vail World Cup, it used to be very American style, certainly different from some of the Asian events and the European events. So, when I look at what I would like to see from competitions in general, it’s something more unique per stop and not necessarily the same holds on the same wall. We're just in a different city and it's a different sequence.

EP: Something that I've often been coming back to is how climbing is more comparable to traditional sports now. If you think of tennis or golf, every place that they go, they're playing on a different surface for tennis. Every golf course is completely different, with varying conditions. What may or may not make the event interesting is that somebody may be better in this certain situation and comes out on top a bit unexpectedly.

I think people want to see that to a certain degree. There was something cool about seeing Neo win and doing well in the earlier rounds. We hadn’t really seen him before. This could just be Japan's roster being insanely deep or that maybe the setting at this event was super well suited to him.

RS: Yeah, I know one thing on the side of coaches and athletes, they will continue to push for more and more clarity on the field of play. More specificity gives them more capability to train in the right way. So, if they know that there's always one coordination boulder and there's always one slab boulder and there's always one electric boulder,
then they can train accordingly. They're constantly going to be pushing for that so that they can be better at what they're expected to do.

If any organizing body that is running a competition solely listens to what the athletes want, they're going to give you a prescriptive type of event so that the athletes and the coaches can train the right way. I think it's important to have a better clarity of vision for what we're trying to accomplish with any event series. In this case we're talking about World Cups, but it could be national events or local events. I do think it would be interesting, I will say, if there was more of that unique nature from event to event, even though the coaches and athletes might not like it as much.

EP: What did you learn from this event that you'll be carrying to your next stop, which is the World Championships in Korea.

RS: No jugs.

EP: Short and sweet.

RS: I think just reminding myself how incredibly talented the athletes are and reminding myself that even though it's day one you have to communicate effectively. You have to work well with the team, don't let the jet lag and the nuance of new relationships get the better of you. Be communicative, establish a clear vision with the team, and then execute it. Don’t haphazardly try to figure it out as you go.

EP: That’s the last question! Is there anything else that you want to add or anybody you want to shout out?

RS: The only thing that I'll add is that in the case of Innsbruck final, so that everyone is very clear, I haven't stopped thinking about this. I think about this every day. I think about it when I'm going to bed, and when I wake up. It's not what we want, and we as the setting team would be the first to say that.

However, we put a lot of work into that route, and into all of the routes as a team. It is certainly a labor of love, a labor of immense skill, and an incredible workload. We are still proud of the work that we did, even though we didn't get the result that we wanted. That's the gamble. As our Head Setter said, “This is competition climbing, right?” Sometimes it goes this way, and that's just part of the drama. That's what makes it interesting and worth watching.