The mesmerising sight of two guys crawling up a wall

And soon we’ll be watching two flies doing the same — if that’s what the gambling industry dictates, writes Declan Lynch

AT some point last Saturday night, I found myself watching the climbing on Eurosport. That would be climbing. A competitive sport which, as the name suggests, involves people climbing up a wall — not up a mountain, although no doubt they’ll soon be showing us that too. This particular climbing event was taking place indoors, with men climbing a wall while they tried to negotiate various obstacles — I don’t know the technical terms for these obstacles, so we’ll just say they were ‘bits sticking out of the wall awkwardly’.

Now regular readers of this column will not be completely surprised to hear that you can watch climbing of some sort on the telly these days; last year we wrote about Free Solo, the astonishing Oscar-winning documentary about the climber Alex Honnold and his ascent of the 3,000-foot granite El Capitan mountain in the ‘free’ style, without ropes or any other such assistance.

Indeed, Honnold has become such a legend, he has presumably influenced this new generation of climbers who can be seen these days on Eurosport; it’s just that, in addition to the fact that they are doing it indoors, thus denying us the great views of El Capitan, they can fall onto a safety cushion if they don’t make it. The daredevil Honnold had no safety cushion: if Alex didn’t make it, he really didn’t make it in any shape or form.

But that is not the main thing that struck me about this extraordinary thing on Eurosport — I can understand perfectly why you’d want a cushion underneath you in this game (and if it were me, I wouldn’t even fancy falling onto the cushion).

No, it was extraordinary in itself that due to the pandemic, the suspension of so many forms of normal entertainment has led to this situation whereby you’d find yourself looking at the climbing — and you’d keep looking at it for a while, almost mesmerised by how astonishingly boring it is, how utterly devoid of any of the usual ingredients of a watchable sport.

I mean, it is no doubt most enjoyable to be actually climbing the walls, and indeed I have since discovered that climbing is quite a thing now, that it is having a moment. But to be watching people climbing the walls… no, I hadn’t seen that one coming.

Because above all else, what we were seeing here was a variation on a theme which seemed to belong only in humorous folklore. We are all familiar with the line about the compulsive gambler, that he would ‘bet on two flies crawling up a wall’. What we were seeing here was not two flies crawling up a wall, but it was very close: it was two guys crawling up a wall.

And you’d better believe that somewhere, somehow, someone was betting on it. This was late on a Saturday night after all, when the juices are flowing. And the smart money says that the measure of any sport these days, as a TV attraction, is whether it can give rise to a betting market. Indeed, the actual sport is often just a conduit for the real action, which is taking place online, with the gambling corporations. And if course it doesn’t have to be sport — you could soon be betting on the Rose of Tralee ‘in running’, if there was a Rose of Tralee.

So while we are most certainly savouring the return of the Premier League, we understand that it is not just improving the mental health of football people and creating a sense that our civilisation is starting to be revived — it is also reviving the betting business, which seems at times to be the only thing that matters.

Likewise the horse racing, with the return of events like the Epsom Derby last Saturday, with full TV coverage and most of all, full gambling coverage. Yes, there are different schools of thought about whether the football and the racing have lost something essential without the roaring of the crowd — the actual crowd, not the virtual one — but increasingly these are old schools of thought. They may even be the school that they knocked down to build the old school, because in a sporting world consumed by online gambling — and often owned by it — you don’t need any crowds.

Indeed if they can put two guys crawling up a wall, and call it sport, and put it on television, the time is surely drawing near when they really will arrange to have two flies crawling up a wall. Just watch them.