Brooke Raboutou | Tokyo 2020 Olympic Profile

Team USA climber Brooke Raboutou shares her experience of qualifying for the Olympics, and explains how each type of climbing will be scored in Tokyo.

Video transcript

BROOKE RABOUTOU: I'm Brooke Raboutou. I'm 19 years old. I started climbing when I was about two years old, born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, and I qualified for the Olympics at the World Championships in Hachioji in August of 2019.

When I first heard about that climbing would be in Olympics, I think it was about 2016 when it got announced. And I was super ecstatic for the sport, but I personally wasn't even thinking about myself yet, because I mean, I wasn't even doing adult competitions yet, and it was kind of more like a wow, this is-- saying this is cool. But it wasn't like this is a dream yet. And I think over the course of the years, it definitely became a dream.

So yeah, then when I qualified, it was definitely a surprise, and especially at that first stage. But I was pretty just shocked to begin with, and it took a while to sink in and realize what it meant for myself and for our team and for the sport as a whole.

Climbing in the Olympics will be a combined format, which is the combination of three disciplines. There's bouldering, speed climbing, and lead climbing. Bouldering and lead climbing are based on difficulty, and speed climbing is based on time. And then pretty simply stated, they will just multiply your scores from each event individually, and the lowest score wins.