Climbing at the Olympic Games.

At a glance

How climbing got in

The BMC says sport climbing was shortlisted for the 2020 Olympics in 2011 but not selected at that stage. On 3 August 2016, at the 129th IOC Session in Rio de Janeiro, IOC members voted to add baseball and softball, karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing to the Tokyo 2020 programme, according to the Canadian Olympic Committee. The vote used a rule that let a host city propose extra sports without binding later Games.

Climbing's first Olympic medals came before Tokyo, at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018, according to World Climbing.

Tokyo 2020, held in 2021

Tokyo had one medal event per gender, a combined event covering Speed, Boulder and Lead. World Climbing explains that in this combined format lower totals ranked higher. The men's final was on 5 August 2021 at Aomi Urban Sports Park.

World Climbing calls Gines Lopez and Garnbret the first Olympic champions in sport climbing. The BMC reports that the women's medals were confirmed after an appeal was rejected.

Paris 2024

Paris split Speed from the other two disciplines: World Climbing says there were two medal events per gender, Speed, and Boulder and Lead combined. The events were held at the Le Bourget Sport Climbing Venue, per Olympics.com results as shown in search.

One source disagrees about the format. LaCrux (17 March 2026) wrote that bouldering was separated from Speed and Lead at Paris with medals of its own. ESPN and the BMC say Boulder and Lead were combined and only Speed stood alone, which matches World Climbing's results.

Boulder and Lead

The scores add the two disciplines together. Roberts scored 63.1 in Boulder and 92.1 in Lead; Anraku scored 69.3 in Boulder and 76.1 in Lead; Schubert's bronze included a Lead score of 96.0, according to World Climbing. Olympics.com describes it as Schubert's second Olympic bronze, after Tokyo. Olympics.com also says Garnbret became the first Slovenian to win two gold medals at a Summer Olympics; World Climbing's headline says she came through an injury scare to win her second Olympic gold.

Speed

World Climbing calls Miroslaw's win the first ever Olympic Speed gold, and says she set a women's world record of 6.06 s in qualification. Leonardo's win was Indonesia's first gold of the Paris Games, according to World Climbing. Olympics.com notes that Paris produced the first Olympic men's Speed title, since Speed had been part of the combined event in Tokyo.

Los Angeles 2028

On 9 April 2025 the IOC Executive Board approved six climbing events for LA28: separate men's and women's Boulder, Lead and Speed. World Climbing says the quota is 76 athletes, 38 women and 38 men, that athletes may enter more than one event, and that the split of places between events would be set in the qualification system. World Climbing's president, Marco Scolaris, said three sets of medals had been the aim from the start of climbing's Olympic journey. The BMC welcomed the decision in a statement dated 10 April.

• Venue: the Long Beach Climbing Theater in Long Beach Sports Park, named by the LA28 Organising Committee on 15 April 2025. It will also host Paralympic para climbing.
• Dates: 24 to 29 July 2028, per World Climbing.
• Qualification: the IOC Executive Board approved the three qualification systems on 1 February 2026. Summaries of the qualification documents say qualifying starts in 2027 and runs through continental events, the 2027 World Championships and an Olympic Qualifier Series, with at most two climbers per country per gender per discipline. We saw those details only in search summaries and have not confirmed them in the documents.

Para climbing makes its Paralympic debut at the same Games. The International Paralympic Committee announced on 3 June 2025 that it will be the 23rd Paralympic sport, with eight medal events and 80 athletes. The classes are on the para climbing page, and the longer story of how competition climbing reached the Games is on competition climbing history.