PARIS: Slovenia's Janja Garnbret took another big step to cementing her status as the world's greatest sport climber by battling her way to a back-to-back Olympic title with a victory in the boulder and lead event at the Paris Games on Saturday.
Already a legend in her field, Garnbret's win gave Slovenia its second gold medal in Paris, and the 25-year-old a place in history as the first Olympic champion in the boulder and lead event.
American Brooke Raboutou took the silver and Austria's Jessica Pilz the bronze.
Climbing made its second Olympics appearance but this was the first Games to split boulder and lead from the speed discipline as is the norm for the sport.
In an atmosphere starkly different from the audience-less Tokyo Games three years ago, Garnbret drew raucous cheers from the sold-out Le Bourget crowd as she strode confidently onto the stage for her first climb.
Her early performance showed Garnbret at her best as she topped the first of the four boulders in a mere half-a-minute, leaving 3-1/2 minutes on the clock and an easy smile on her face.
In boulder, athletes rack up points by negotiating four boulder "problems" on a 4.5-metre-high wall, while in lead, they aim to climb a 15-metre wall as high as possible in a single attempt. The scores are added up to decide the rankings.
However, after appearing to pick up a finger injury along the way, Garnbret had trouble on the final boulder, leaving her with an unusually small gap, of just 0.4 points, to second-placed Raboutou going into the lead stage.
That left the title race extremely close, requiring Garnbret to fight hard on the lead route.
In the end, she managed to do enough, ending with 168.5 points and bringing the rapturous crowd to their feet and Garnbret crumbling to the floor in tears of joy.
"I don't even know how to explain (how I'm feeling) with words. I'm just feeling incredibly happy and proud of myself - what I did," she said.
Garnbret's dominance in the sport is hard to overstate: a combined 53 titles in the world championships and World Cups since 2016.
But she stressed that no contest was ever easy, and the pressure to perform was something she also had to train for.
"I don't know if people realise how hard it is to go out there and just do it. Because it might seem like, 'OK, Janja will win,' But it's never like that," she said, revealing that she had cried after the boulder round, afraid that she had fractured a finger that got stuck in one of the holds.
The ending, though, was the right one for her and the other medallists.
"This was just the dream," said Raboutou, whom Garnbret called her best friend in the climbing circuit. "We both want each other to do our best, and that's what happened today." - Reuters