None of his names have been flagged as offensive. Rob LeBreton, one of the original developers (route setters) and guidebook author for Nowra, was approached by the ABC to be interviewed but did not respond. "It just seems like an outdated perspective, most likely coming from someone who's never been subject to any form of discrimination or harassment," they said. The argument that "it was funny at the time" carries no weight for Edwards, though. It would be a travesty if it was supressed for something as trivial and irrelevant to real life as political correctness." ( Supplied: Berna Fuchslueger)Īnother said: "Climbers do seem to have a unique, and at times excruciatingly funny, sense of humour. Ulf Fuchslueger says debate over renaming routes online ended up "pretty nasty". The debate first began in Mexico two years ago, according to Fuchslueger, over a route called Tinder Pussy. There was a time when only a handful of people would have known about the names, but the explosion in popularity of indoor climbing has led to many more people discovering them after making the switch to outdoor climbing. "For someone who may not have come out to their family or friends, to see these really homophobic slurs, if they read those things in the climbing space, or if they hear someone making a joke, how are they ever going to become comfortable in themselves, let alone to their climbing peers to be themselves?" Edwards said. Names such as Flogging a Dead Faggot - which has recently been reviewed and is listed in The Crag as "Sanitize Review" - are particularly problematic for gay climbers. "I obviously am not comfortable with it, I know a lot of friends that are also not comfortable with it." Climbing community pushes back "When it was a bunch of young guys down at the crag, I don't think they had the intention of anyone else doing those. "A lot of the racially toned names have come from rap culture, which in the '80s and '90s wasn't so much discussed as inappropriate for white people to reference," Horan said. "If you look at the people who were climbing early on, it's a very male, white-dominated sport," said Riley Edwards, president of LGBTQ rock climbing and social club ClimbingQTs.Ī lot of those young men were listening to rap and punk and naming route names after their favourite songs, or making jokes about sex and porn. Read moreĪnd it was particularly popular with some social groups - "punks, a bunch of hippies", according to Horan.
"Very often in Australia, once a name is given to the first route on a cliff, people try to stay in the same context."Īustralian climber Tom O'Halloran is chasing his dream of competing in a new Olympic sport in Tokyo next year. "These names are maybe given in a moment of excitement and people are very young and think they're funny," The Crag's head of business development, Ulf Fuchslueger, said. Hundreds of thousands of others exist in cyberspace on a database called The Crag, which also functions as a social network for climbers. Some of them are written down in print in the form of guidebooks. It all goes back to one of climbing's unwritten rules around the sanctity of what's known as "the first ascensionist" - the person who first climbs a route has the right to name it. It moved from the alternative to the mainstream as indoor climbing gyms took off and the sport became an Olympic event. The debate has exposed fractures in a sport that has grown massively over the past decade.
Many relate to sexual acts, while others refer to band names, musicians, drugs, and even Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Indoor rock climbing has grown in popularity in recent years. There are thousands of route names in Australia alone. "And then one of our other friends, who'd been climbing for not too long, made reference to it, I thought, 'Actually, that is really bad.'" "I started climbing when I was seven and I'd never considered the implication of the names - I guess that's my privilege. "Definitely it's grotesque," Emma Horan, who has represented Australia in climbing and runs one of Sydney's largest bouldering gyms, said. Names like Rape and Carnage, Rape and Pillage, Flogging a Dead Faggot, Pasty Poofs and One Less Bitch have been raised as being deeply offensive.Īs a result, climbing has been forced to reconcile its past. In just the past two months, a debate has exploded within the climbing fraternity about route names considered to be sexist, misogynistic, homophobic and racist. Warning: The following article contains words and phrases that may offend some readers None more so than the sport of rock climbing, where a debate about the names of climbing routes has divided what was once a small, close-knit community with strong traditions.