Sam Watson (left) set a world record in the men's sport climbing speed bronze medal race at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. (Jonathan Nackstrand/Getty Images)
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LE BOURGET, France — Sam Watson scaled a 49-foot wall in 4.74 seconds on Thursday, but missed out on an Olympic gold medal.
He scaled the super-vertical surface like a giant squirrel and completed this standardized “speed climbing” course faster than any human had ever done before.
He returned to Earth as the fastest man in the fastest Olympic sport, and thousands of fans rose to their feet to salute him.
A few minutes later, he put the bronze medal around his neck and forced a smile.
Watson, an 18-year-old Texan, wasn't quite sure what to make of this strange dichotomy. “I haven't experienced it yet,” he said here at the climbing site in Le Bourget. He had mastered this wild, ephemeral sport, but he'd also struggled with its incredibly fine details.
“Speed climbing is probably the sport with the smallest margin of error in all of the Olympic sports,” he said, hours after he and other climbers proved it.
Take, for example, the quarterfinal race between reigning world champion Matteo Zurroni of Italy and Peng Wu of China. They heard the starting buzzer. They ran skyward, using the 20 red handrails and 11 little scooters on each wall to work their way up. They almost simultaneously hit the timing panel, then looked up to see the clock stretched to three decimal places.
Zurroni's 4.997 was red and he thought, “Oh crap,” as he placed his hands on his head as he was hoisted to the ground, regulated by a harness.
Five feet away, Peng was “excited.” His watch was green and showed 4.995.
Watson, meanwhile, breezily won his quarterfinal. He'd set a world record of 4.75 seconds in the heats earlier this week. But a few minutes later, near the top of a gravity-defying obstacle course he'd climbed thousands of times, in his semifinal against Peng, “I missed a hold by just a few millimeters,” Watson says. That caused him to lose a bit of power, costing him an estimated 0.2 seconds. He lost to Peng by 0.08 seconds.
“I've lost the most important game of my life,” Watson thought.
But he didn't have time to dwell on that thought. “Right now, in five minutes, I have two of the most important races of my life, back to back,” he said.
And in the final race of this fast-paced Olympic event, the “small final,” he shaved 0.01 seconds off his own world record, clocking 4.74 seconds.
A minute later, Indonesia's Vedrick Leonardo clocked 4.75 seconds in the final, followed by Penn in 4.77 seconds – both the fastest so far this week.
In speed climbing, the path is always the same and never changes, so muscle memory is built and you strive for perfection.
Watson's goal, he says, is to one day scale the wall in under 4.6 seconds. (Zurroni says he thinks speed climbers can eventually break 4.4 seconds.) Watson has been training for years, since he probably started the sport when he was 5 years old. He has poured himself into the sport for hours. He's passionate about a sport that often leaves him with nasty injuries — torn nails, sprained toes, bleeding cuts and wrenched knees — and he won't let anything stop him from competing.
Along the way, he's learned to take it easy: “It's 30 moves at top speed, so mistakes are going to happen,” he said.
But nothing could have prepared him for the whirlwind of “mixed” emotions he felt on Thursday.
“I came here with the goal of winning the gold medal,” he admitted a few hours after winning the bronze medal. When he missed out on the gold medal, he felt something, but couldn't quite articulate what it was.
Sam Watson poses next to a screen holding up his world record time of 4.74 during the sport climbing awards ceremony after Watson's world record time in the bronze medal race. (Luke Hales/Getty Images)
“But,” Watson said after breaking the world record five minutes later, “I was so emotional.” He hugged his coach and family. He found the board with his time on it and asked organizers for a “Usain Bolt-style photo.” He wanted to “thank them so much for making my crazy idea a reality.”
“And no one can take away from me this right to be an Olympic medalist and to hold a piece of the original Eiffel Tower in my hands,” he said as the proceedings began. “And no one can take away the four world records that I broke. This will be with me forever.”
