Opinion: Why I Love and Hate Livestreamed Sends
On September 20th, Austrian professional climber Jakob Schubert successfully completed the first ascent of Project Big, in the same granite cave of Flatanger, Norway that produced routes like Change and Silence, a 5.15c and 5.15d, respectively, both firsts for the grade. Originally bolted by Adam Ondra in 2013, the massive 130-plus-foot line hadn’t seen much serious action until last year, when he and Schubert began projecting it in earnest.
Schubert’s send of Project Big, renamed a few days later to simply B.I.G., marks a monumental moment in modern sport climbing history. It is only the fourth route to be proposed at the vaunted 5.15d grade, along with the aforementioned Silence; DNA in the Verdon Gorge in France, sent by Seb Bouin in 2022; and Bibliographie in Céüse, France, originally completely by Alex Megos in 2020 before being seconded by Stefano Ghisolfi the following year and subsequently downgraded to 5.15c. Schubert came to the decision on B.I.G.’s grade after consulting with Ondra, the only other person to put in any real effort on it, noting that it felt “way easier” than Perfecto Mundo, a 5.15c that took him a short three weeks to successfully complete.
As colossal an accomplishment as sending 5.15d is—or 5.15c even, should it ever get Ghisolfi’ed—Schubert’s completion of B.I.G. is a potential inflection point for climbing at large and it has little to do with the difficulty of the route itself or even the Austrian’s performance on it. What makes this particular send so interesting is that it was livestreamed for all the world to witness in real-time.
For those fortunate enough to follow along that fateful day, watching Schubert work his way up the route—traversing rightward through the easier 5.11d terrain before switching to a second rope to ease the drag (and ditching the beanie) as he worked his way into the teeth of the route, including a V12 boulder problem around move 85 before letting up for an “easier” 5.13b/c finish—was experiential, a you-had-to-be-there moment in time. It was lightning in a bottle. For all the fanfare—the drone shots, the multiple camera angles, the obligatory pre-recorded ads—watching Schubert’s send felt intimate in a way that other send videos haven’t been able to capture. It was like watching your favorite band play an impromptu basement after they hit it big.
Much of the event’s magnetism, at least from the viewing perspective, came from its immediacy, and the lack of a guaranteed outcome. Unlike other high-profile sends, like Daniel Woods’ completion of the V17 Return of the Sleepwalker, which had damn near three anticipation-building months between send and video release, watching Schubert’s livestream was done only with the hope of a successful outcome but no promise for it. The inevitability of the traditional send video in a lot of ways compresses the emotional impact of the journey. The lows aren’t as low because we know they will be overcome in short order, and by corollary, the highs aren’t as high; we know how the story ends, it’s why we’re tuning in.
What was more likely, especially given the rainy, wet conditions, was that this video would end in the same way as the five previous livesteamed attempts had: in failure. But when this one turned out different, we, along with Schubert, got to share in the surprise. We got to experience the ecstasy.
The allure of watching livestreamed send attempts at these stratospheric levels goes deeper than simply witnessing the success as it happens. (And really, if we took a second to truly consider the awesome technology required to make real-time video sharing, in high-definition, from remote locations like Flatanger possible—and that we all now have this tech readily available in our pockets—we would perhaps be rightfully even more gob smacked than by the information this future-is-now technology is disseminating.) It’s in how it peels back the curtain to let us in on what is normally done in relative solitude. We get to see these individuals not as infallible climbing machines but as mortals, give or take. We get to watch Schubert’s nervy preamble before the burn, footage that would have surely wound up on the editing room floor were this not live—but whose inclusion only endeared him to the audience all the more. We get the anticipatory rope flaking, the tension building with each quiet moment before Schubert pulls onto the route. (Even professionals get butterflies before redpoint attempts. They’re just like us!)
We can feel the pacing of the route and Schubert’s methodical approach to it, and how the route breaks into parts via various knee-barred rests. And we get the unclipping of the chains for the glorious (but not immediate) victory whip. Unlike other send videos, we get to watch the drama of it all unfold organically. We don’t need back-to-back replays of Schubert sticking a certain move to inform us that it’s a big moment; and you know when that hold broke post-crux that it would have been replayed in triplicate were this a traditional video.
We get to see the failure. Not just the flashy outbursts and montaged yowls of glossier videos that gesture at what really goes into climbing at this level, we see the real failure in all its mundane glory. And it’s what gives the breakthrough its impact. The magic is in the yin and yang, in the movement and the repose.
If we look into our crystal ball, it’s not difficult to divine a world where Schubert’s livestreamed send of B.I.G. sets a new standard in the way this sort of climbing media will be created and consumed. Along with Will Bosi’s similarly broadcast sessions leading up to his send of Burden of Dreams (V17), more and more professional climbers will—and in my opinion should—follow suit on their own futuristic projects.
Still, there is a part of me that worries that this new paradigm will be a net negative on the future of climbing, that we will look back on these videos in particular as the point where a certain decline was hastened all the more. Parkour boulders, coordination moves, even the reemergence of jamming, seen now in every commercial gym, can all be traced back to some World Cup or other. Look at the impact Mellow has had on every upstart climbing née streetwear brand. Even send videos have roots in the professionals’ VHS tapes of old. We all want to do what our heroes do, and it would be naïve to believe that this new mode would be the first innovation judiciously left to the professionals. It’s going to trickle down.
Soon enough the timeline is going to get clogged with more and more #climbersofinstagram livestreaming their gym sessions. They’re going to become unavoidable. Though frankly, that’s the least of my concerns; you can always log off, which I have found myself doing more and more already anyway. New questions will arise, about etiquette and privacy and what we owe to everyone else inhabiting the same space we are trying to livestream in. But the real issue here is how livestreaming will impact why we climb.
I’ve previously written about how the social mediafication of climbing is having a corrupting influence on our relationship with the sport. Our growing need to post to the Gram every send, both in nature and the gym, undermines our ability to climb per se, for the sake of the climbing itself. The new goal is content and climbing is just the medium, engagement the drug and climbing the needle. Livestreaming, the latest way to “connect” with followers, is the send video on steroids.
The reality of the situation is that, for all our desire to emulate them, being a professional climber is a different animal entirely. And the grand irony here is that we amateur climbers have an existential sort of freedom not afforded to the superhuman amongst us. We get to determine our own meaning in climbing and enjoy the challenge without it being for some other purpose, unsullied by the necessity of monetization. Professionals don’t. Jakob Schubert wouldn’t be Jakob Schubert if he had to fit in his climbing around his job as an accountant. Climbing has to be your job. And part of that job here in the year of our Lord Twenty and Twenty-Three is content creation. Not to mention the burden of proof, which naturally falls upon the shoulders of every climber who profits from the occasions in which they go into woods, just to emerge again claiming a send.
It’s simple economics, really. It’s supply and demand. World class climbers like Schubert can provide something—can be something—only a handful of people alive can, and it’s something the rest of us want. So in their hands, the commoditization of climbing makes sense, for all parties involved. But as anyone who has ever worked their “dream job” can attest, commerce, the day-to-day drudgery of it all, has a way of dulling the excitement. That’s not to say that the pros don’t enjoy sharing their accomplishments or the journey they took to get there, but it’s still a job, and the clock has to be punched.
As for the rest of us, our hobby just gets to be our hobby, the thing we obsess about to get us through the parts of our day we spend working. Mercifully, we get to avoid the occupational tedium. We get the pure, uncut climbing. And yet we still choose to adulterate it, to micro-commoditize it for likes and engagement. Livestreaming feels like the next giant step down that slippery slope away from whatever Truth drew us to climbing in the first place.
Still, for better or worse, livestreaming is the future of the send video, and I do hope we see more of it from professional climbers. Watching next-level sends occur in real-time is enthralling content, and content in and of itself is not a bad thing. My hope is that this is where it stays. My fear is that it won’t. Technology will continue to advance faster than our ability to utilize it responsibly or even grasp fully what all we are leaving in its wake.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor of Sprudge.com and climber based in Dallas, Texas.
Also Read
The post Opinion: Why I Love and Hate Livestreamed Sends appeared first on Climbing.