How Memphis became the unlikely center of the climbing world

MEMPHIS — Jake Plasco, a 16-year-old Memphian, aims to win an Olympic medal in climbing.

And if you are tempted to read that sentence a second time, just to make sure you can get your mind around it, I don’t blame you in the least. An Olympic medal in climbing? Yes. That’s an actual thing. Climbing is scheduled to debut as an Olympic sport this summer in Tokyo.

OK, but a 16-year-old Memphis kid is into climbing?

Absolutely. What sort of boulder have you been living under?

Memphis has two world-class climbing gyms: Memphis Rox and High Point Climbing and Fitness. Plasco, a junior at Arlington High School, is just one of a throng of Memphians who have fallen in love with the sport.

And this weekend, High Point is hosting the United States Climbing team trials, which will select the men and women who will represent the country at international climbing competitions.

“No, Memphis isn’t what you’d consider to be a climbing capital,” said Nathanial Coleman, one of the four Americans who have qualified for the U.S. Olympic team, all four of whom are in Memphis this weekend. “But the facilities here are top of the class.”

It was not always thus. Before Memphis Rox opened in 2018, Memphis was the largest city in the country without a climbing gym.

Which makes sense, really. We can be a sadly sedentary lot. Google says our elevation is 338 feet above sea level. Our most ambitious climbers are of the social sort (see the recent story on Memphis in Vanity Fair).

So Memphis Rox was a revelation, a world-class, nonprofit, paywhat-you-can climbing gym located in Soulsville and dedicated to make climbing available to all.

Next came High Point, a sparkling 32,000-foot climbing gym located on Humphreys Boulevard.

“I was born at Baptist Hospital, right across the street,” said John Wiygul, the president of High Point, who joined with a friend named Johnny O’Brien to establish High Point Fitness back in 2013.

“Memphis was actually going to be our first gym,” O’Brien said. “But then Chattanooga asked us to build a gym downtown. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. So the Memphis gym opened four years later than we anticipated, but it’s now our flagship. We wanted to build a gym that could host first-class events.”

Such as this weekend’s U.S. team trials. In which competitors from across the country will fly up a sheer 60-foot wall in the time it takes you to say, “How the heck are they doing that?”

That event is called “speed climbing,” one of the three disciplines in the sport. The others are “bouldering” and “lead,” which I would explain to you in exacting detail except you’ll just have to learn it all again when the Olympics roll around in July.

But the point is, climbing is booming. There are now more than 800 climbing gyms across the United States. It says something about High Point that USA Climbing decided to bring the national trials here.

Indeed, between this event, the St. Jude Marathon, the St. Jude IRONMAN, and the tens of thousands of Memphians who have spent a good deal of the pandemic running and biking in Shelby Farms and on the Greenline, it’s possible we might even becoming less sedentary. Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

As for Plasco, the kid from Arlington, he really does aspire to make the Olympic team. And if Memphis can produce the coach of the USA Snowboarding team (see Mike Jankowski, proud graduate of Christian Brothers High School), who’s to say the city can’t produce an Olympic climber, too?

The only bad news is that Memphians can’t actually go to High Point this weekend and watch the Olympians compete. COVID took care of that. But look for the rebroadcast on ESPN to see what (and who) is up.