Watching competition climbing.

Coming up

Santiago decides the 2026 Lead and Speed overall titles. World Climbing's published schedule, in local time, is: women's Lead qualification and men's and women's Speed qualification on 23 October; men's Lead qualification and the Speed finals on 24 October; and the Lead semi-finals and finals on 25 October. The standings going into it are on the 2026 World Climbing Series page.

Where World Climbing streams and broadcasts

World Climbing publishes a separate "where to watch" page for each event, so the broadcasters can change from one event to the next. The fullest list in our research is the one for Chamonix, 10 to 12 July 2026.

World Climbing's YouTube channel

For Chamonix 2026, World Climbing said its YouTube channel would stream the Lead and Boulder semi-finals and finals and the Speed qualification and finals, with geo-blocking in some territories.

Broadcasters named for Chamonix 2026

South Korea appears twice in World Climbing's list, with a delayed broadcast on IB Sports and a live YouTube stream.

Madrid 2026

A similar page exists for the Comunidad de Madrid event in May 2026. As summarised in search, it named YouTube for Central and South America (excluding Brazil and Mexico), Globo in Brazil and TV Azteca in Mexico. We did not read its full list.

Olympic climbing

Paris 2024 climbing finals were available as replays on Olympics.com, where event videos appeared in our search results. Broadcasters for Los Angeles 2028 are not in our research.

What to watch for

Each discipline rewards something different. How competitions work has the full detail.

• Boulder: since 2025, a zone is worth 10 points and a top 25, with 0.1 taken off for each failed attempt, so a four-problem final is out of 100 (Gripped, 6 March 2025). Finals have eight athletes, and several climb at once except in the first and last rotations.
• Lead: athletes climb a bolted route, clipping the rope into protection as they go (Wikipedia). Olympics.com, in a summary we could not confirm on a World Climbing page, describes the aim as climbing as high as possible within six minutes on a route not seen beforehand.
• Speed: the route is the same everywhere, finals are head-to-head races, and the first to hit the finish pad wins (World Climbing). Some 2026 events also used four-lane walls and relays. Times can be checked against the Speed records.

Beyond competitions

Two outdoor climbs in 2026 were shown live. Gripped reported that Jakob Schubert's second ascent of DNA (9c) on 10 October 2026 was livestreamed, and that Netflix broadcast Alex Honnold's ascent of Taipei 101 live, as Skyscraper Live, on 24 January 2026. Both are on the notable ascents page.

The 2026 Piolets d'Or, the mountaineering awards, are being presented in the Oisans, France, from 21 to 25 October 2026, as part of the Edition Zero of the Festival International de l'Alpinisme; see the Piolets d'Or page.