Exclusive – Olympic champion Janja Garnbret speaks out on eating … – Olympics

In a sport where athletes hang by boulders at impossible inclines and scale 15-metre walls in less than five seconds, every kilo matters.

Or so it seems, at least, to sport climbers who are looking for quick gains.

Less labour intensive or time consuming than training, cutting down on meals is often hailed as the ultimate shortcut to get faster on a climbing wall. Entering a gym with rail-thin climbers, where a starved frame leads to compliments rather than concern, endorses that attitude.

It is an environment that Garnbret, who got started in the sport at age seven, knows all too well.

Five days before the start of the 2023 IFSC Sport Climbing World Championships with all eyes on the then six-time world champion Garnbret made an Instagram post that sent ripples across the sports community.

A black and white photograph of the Olympic champion, it featured this raw caption: Do we want to raise the next generation of skeletons? Lets not look away.

In the text that accompanied the post, Garnbret detailed the problem of eating disorders in sport climbing and called for more awareness and action.

"This was a very, very sensitive topic, so it was very important to choose the right words," she told Olympics.com. "I didn't want to call out any names or [be] offensive. I just wanted to share my thoughts on it, so not being disrespectful in any way.

"I also have friends who were in this kind of position and I saw what was happening to them, and I just don't want any other person to go through something like that."

Eating disorders are common among elite as well as amateur sport climbers, and more and more of them are now starting to share their stories.

One athlete recalled the pride he mistakenly felt when his extreme weight loss earned him the monicker "Auschwitz Boy", while other climbers have opened up about their self-destructive patterns of starving, bingeing and then punishing themselves with excessive exercise.

"It starts off with how we talk about food. We have to talk about food as fuel and not a bad thing," Garnbret said. "We cannot close our eyes that climbing is a sport related to weight, so we have to fight gravity. And of course you want to be light, but not too light, and there's a thin line between being too light.

"We as a society, first, we need to openly talk about it. We need to talk about how we define what fit means, does it mean this or that. And we have to openly talk about it. Also coaches have to be really educated on that because you have coaches that are actually saying to their athletes that they need to be skinnier, but this is not sustainable and this is not the way to go. So first, we need to create a healthy environment that you can thrive in and that's the most important thing."

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Exclusive - Olympic champion Janja Garnbret speaks out on eating ... - Olympics