SALT LAKE CITY — It's a big weekend in the climbing community as athletes with a dream to compete in the Olympics flood to Utah for the World Cup competition.
The 2024 Olympics are still a year away but the path to Paris makes a stop in Salt Lake City this weekend.
Aspiring Olympic climbers from countries around the globe are here to compete in the World Cup and looking for a spot on their respective national teams.
Kyra Condie is a former Olympian and USA climbing team member who lives in Utah and will attend the event. She's hoping to make the team again and compete on the world stage.
"I feel incredibly lucky to be in the position that I'm in," she reflected. "I really love having a platform where I get to, you know, talk to young girls and give them the hopefully motivation, I want to be strong and independent."
Top-level climbers like Condie are naturally high energy and the sport was her outlet beginning at age 11.
"Just like literally because we were bouncing off the walls," she explained. "This way we could climb them."
She centers that intensity, training with the Salt Lake City-based USA Climbing team twice a day several times a week.
"I think being a climber moving to Utah just makes sense," Condie said. "You have the mountains here, you have so much natural rock around here. And then also these gyms and facilities are just spectacular. We have really great training, really great community and really great resources."
Her road to success hasn't been easy as she endured a major back surgery at age 13 where surgeons fused ten of her vertebrae together. Condie is the first olympian to have that severe of a fusion, which gave her an even bigger voice in the world of climbing.
"I also love having the platform to speak about that and hopefully inspire other kids with scoliosis to like, get out and challenge themselves and not think of their condition as like limitation and be able to still pursue their dreams," she reflected.
Condie and teammate Jesse Grupper say doing well in this weekend’s world events is a step toward qualifying for the Olympics
Grupper has devoted almost 20 years to the sport, moving to Utah from New Jersey to focus his talent.
"There's so much to love about climbing," he said. "It's a mental and physical challenge. Every time I approach the wall, it's like a new puzzle, to figure out and solve."
Grupper has a degree in mechanical engineering with a research fellowship in Biodesign at Harvard. His career creates collaboration, which he carries over into the ethics of his sport.
"You'll see athletes even, you know, in the stiffest competitions, providing beta or, you know, that shared knowledge of like how to do a climb with one another, even though it might mean that they place worse, we prefer to, like work together to, you know, kind of conquer the challenges in front of us," he explained.
Both Condie and Grupper hope to carry over their success from the last world cup event in Japan into this weekend. Beginning Friday, the second World Cup Climbing event of the season brings the best climbers from around the world to Pioneer Park.
It is open and free to spectators.
