Jesse Grupper Nearly Gave Up on Comps. Now He’s an Olympian.
Three years ago, Jesse Grupper was climbing outside and working full time. He wasn't sure he wanted that to change. Here's how it did.
The post Jesse Grupper Nearly Gave Up on Comps. Now He’s an Olympian. appeared first on Climbing.
When Climbing interviewed Jesse Grupper in October 2021, he was working full time in a robotics lab in Boston, helping to design a hand-rehabilitation exoskeleton for post-stroke patients. Though Grupper was still climbing hard—he’d just flashed Livin’ Astro, a notoriously beta-intensive 5.14c in Rumney, New Hampshire, and was just days away from winning U.S. Nationals—he’d been left unsatisfied by his brief run on the 2019 World Cup circuit, and wanted to take a step back and focus on helping others. He did not have his sights on the Paris Olympics. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to compete in World Cups again.
Grupper, 27, was born in Brooklyn, raised in suburban New Jersey, and grew up climbing at the New Jersey Rock Gym in Fairfield. He was a successful competitor early on, winning Youth Bouldering Nationals in 2008, winning the USA Climbing’s National Sport Climbing Series in 2014, and taking silver in the IFSC Youth World Championships in 2015. But when most of his hard-climbing peers headed to climbing hubs like Salt Lake City or Boulder for college, Grupper stayed east to complete an engineering degree at Tufts University in Boston. And during his freshman year, he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an incurable bowel disease that drastically complicated his diet and seemed to flare up during periods of stress. Though the disease added a vexing new variable to hard climbing—whether in competition or outside—his experimentation with treatments and plans, combined with his continued ability to perform well in competitions (he won the Collegiate Sports Championship in 2018 and the lead category at USA Nationals in 2019), gave him a personal appreciation for how modern medicine and technology can improve someone’s quality of life. Deciding he wanted to put his energy into helping others in similar situations, he founded Tufts’s Biomechanics Club, and spent much of his college and post-collegiate years applying his mechanical engineering expertise to a variety of prosthetic projects, ranging from hand-rehabilitation design to something called an industrial shoulder, a kind of soft robotic arm that helps workers lift their arms over their heads for more extended periods of time.
Despite these interests Grupper remained a climber, and he wanted to honor the 14 years he’d put into it. And after winning Nationals in 2021, he decided to take part in the U.S. Team Trials in March 2022, where he ended up making the team in both Boulder and Lead—which rekindled his competition dreams.
After a slow bouldering season, Grupper took the lead discipline by storm—winning two World Cup golds and medaling in two more. Suddenly—and for the first time—the Olympics became something of a “beacon of excitement,” he said, “something that I really want to shoot for.”
Unlike most of the talented young athletes competing in traditional Olympic disciplines—track and field, swimming, gymnastics, etc.—who set their sights (or their dreams) on reaching the Olympics in the early stages of their competitive careers, the Olympics is a relatively new goal for climbers. Sport Climbing’s inclusion in the Olympics wasn’t official until 2016, and its first appearance, in Tokyo 2021, involved a combined format that lumped speed climbing into the same medal contest as lead and bouldering. When I asked whether he’d ever considered trying to qualify for Tokyo, Grupper said he was too slow, then jokingly referred to himself as the “sloth of climbing.” It was only later, when speed climbing was carved off into its own discipline, that the Olympics were possible for him—and even so, the fact that Bouldering and Lead are not separate medal disciplines presents some problems.
As a lead specialist, Grupper is a major underdog in Paris. But in some ways, he says, being an underdog takes a bit of the pressure off. While his relatively weak performance during Monday’s Boulder semifinal (he came in 18th place and accumulated just 18.9 points) is disappointing, it’s not surprising. To date, his best World Cup Bouldering is 27th place (in Innsbruck in 2022). And during the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago, he barely squeaked out a fourth place finish in bouldering. But Grupper then went on to absolutely dominate the lead round, finishing a full 35 points ahead of the second palace spot, which more than enough to offset his lower bouldering score, and securing his golden ticket to the Olympics. In tomorrow’s Lead semifinal in Paris, he’s hoping a similar performance will carry him on to finals.
When I asked him if he wished the lead and bouldering were different medal disciplines, he demurred—then said that, even though he’s performed better in lead, the two disciplines hold equal weight. He has been climbing for almost 20 years and has seen the sport evolve significantly over the past two decades. In the past, he said, the competitions were quite different, and skills like coordination and momentum weren’t a major focus. Today, those are essential pieces of modern competition. “Being more powerful makes you more efficient on a lead wall as well,” he said. “The modern style has definitely pushed me to understand a new way of climbing, which I see as a gift in disguise. Pushing yourself to new realms is why I started climbing. It’s really exciting to do that on this stage.”
But winning isn’t the only focus for Grupper in Paris. Indeed, he’s just happy to be able to try hard. For most of 2024, Grupper was dealing with a finger injury—a common and dreaded climbing injury—that kept him from training how and as much as he ideally would have. He opened up about this recently on his Instagram, noting that it was disappointing to have “put a lot of weight on myself to peak this summer” only to find that, thanks to the injury, he was “moving further and further away from this goal.” But, in classic Grupper fashion, he found a silver lining: “Today my finger is far from perfect, but I feel fortunate to be able to focus on joy in movement rather than anticipated pain. Climbing is beautiful, a privilege and not something I’ll be taking for granted in the near future.”
His positive attitude, and his experiences with Ulcerative Colitis, may explain how Grupper always seems able to appreciate the sheer fact that he has the opportunity to climb and to try—something that helps him dive into his training even during those periods of his life when he’s been busy with school and lab work. “I know the time that I have in the gym is meaningful and needs to count. Every second that I’m on the wall, I try to put in that much more effort to make it count.”
The finger injury has also given him time to reflect on the hidden benefit of his bioengineering career: it ensures that climbing isn’t his sole focus, which takes the pressure away. “I think that was always my biggest concern with being a professional climber,” he told me. “What happens if you get injured or if the psych is just not there? And I think having this separate job is where I can find fulfillment helps me to not tie my full worth to rock climbing. I think that’s really important for anyone to do.”
Whatever happens, Grupper plans to take a step back after the Olympics to recalibrate and reflect on his career as a competitor. He’s particularly excited about taking a beach vacation, something he hasn’t really done before. “My family was always like, ‘We want to go to the beach!’ and I was like, ‘but there’s no climbing there… so we can’t.'”
He’s also looking forward to getting outside and pushing his limits in outdoor climbing projects again. Growing up in climbing’s pre-Olympic era, Grupper—one of the few American climbers to have flashed a 5.14c, having done it twice—thought of competitions as a way to train for peak performance in outdoor climbing. He still retains a bit of that mentality. “I haven’t had the chance to truly project any one route for a long period or visit many iconic areas in the country that are important for the sport’s history,” he explained.
Perhaps, this fall, you’ll find him out on the rocks.
Three more Grupper facts:
- He finds time in his Olympic training regimen to collaborate with a group called Peak Potential, which helps children with physical disabilities learn to climb.
- He has daily yoga and meditation practices that help him stay grounded and help keep things like his training—or finger injuries—from becoming all-consuming.
- During his training or before comps, he often listens to the soundtrack of Hamilton or Moana—both of which scream positivity and good vibes.
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