Canada’s newest bouldering gym, Boulderz, hosted the third leg of the Eastern division of the Tour de Bloc this weekend, on January 10th 2009. The event was organized beautifully, especially considering how short noticed the plans for this event were. Boulderz is a beautiful bouldering gym near downtown Toronto boasting amazing features, lots of perfectly angled walls, and a ton of brand new holds. Far from being new to the bouldering scene, the owner Andrew, knows what boulderers what: A great facility, with an awesome atmosphere, and loads of new problems/holds. And on that front, Boulderz delivers. However, I digress. One of the problems for this competition was the size of the gym (capacity of about 50-60 climbers), some participants, and organizers were concerned that the space wouldn’t be enough for a Tour de Bloc competition. The organizers were clever enough to top the number of registrants to a max of 50, splitting the beginners/rec and open, to give climbers a little more room to run around.
I am psyched to say that this leg of the tour was a huge success on all accounts. The problem setting was nearing perfection, thanks to the organizer’s planning, which gave the setters about 15 hours to forerun the problems. The qualifying problems weren’t too hard so that people did manage to finish the top 5 problems, and they were also very well spread out so that competitors didn’t have to wait 30 minutes to climb a problem. The finals were absolutely perfect for the crowd. Just hard enough for the women to finish all of them (top two finish all three problems!), but also hard enough to kick some butts in order to give us a good spread during the finals. Very well done!
I do want to plug one comment about the comp, and it is now the second comp in a row to do this (Climber’s Rock did it too). When the women who qualified first is climbing the second problem, the setters are too quick to put up the problems for the men’s final which is really distracting for both the crowd and the climber. I think that waiting for the last women (first in qualifying round) to finish problem 2 before they start putting up the men’s problems would be nice. In fact, they could wait until the women’s field is completely done before starting the men’s problems as it takes away from the show the best women (according to the qualifying round) will be giving the crowd on the last problem. Just my two cents here. Other than that, brilliant comp. Congrats Jodi and Luigi, and thank you for putting such great comps!
Results: Women’s Open
- Erin Ford-Zieleniewski
- Bonnie de Bruijn
- Amanda Berezowski
- Nicole Ko
- Brigitte Robert
- Allysa Herzig
Results: Men’s Open
- Dustin Curtis
- Jean-Marc Grenier
- Ayo Sopeju
- Tash Zielinski
- Andre Cheuk
- Jamie Stuart
- Dave Voltan
- Tony Berlier
Posted by Miguel
