All Italian regions boast enthusiasts, led respectively by Piedmont, Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. And the success of the sport has increased further with its entry, in Tokyo 2020, among the Olympic disciplines; three years after its debut among the five circles, sport climbing will be present again at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with four gold medals up for grabs: speed and combined bouldering and lead, in both men’s and women’s events. The sport climbing events will be held in Le Bourget from 5 to 10 August 2024.

The history of modern climbing began in the late 1980s, and has been consolidated here with the start of the annual RockMaster event, which still takes place in Arco, in the province of Trento, a town that can be defined as the ‘Home of Climbing’ par excellence.

The large climbing gyms that continue to be designed and built everywhere constitute a very peculiar building typology in sports architecture, with high walls for lead and speed specialities and low, overhanging walls for bouldering. It is, however, increasingly common to find equipped walls inside ordinary gyms or in school gyms, where they are now preferred to the traditional Swedish poles and squares.

Sint Roc and sport climbing

If Arco is the city of climbing par excellence, it is not by chance that Sint Roc, founded by Angelo Seneci, who has also been the technical director of Rock Master since 1987, was born here.

The most important moments in the history of this sport have always seen Sint Roc among the protagonists: from the first experiments at the end of the 1980s to the boom of recent decades, it has contributed to the birth and development of sport climbing, accompanying the evolution and diffusion of artificial climbing structures.

Sint Roc is one of the first companies in the world to have built artificial climbing structures, and in over thirty years of history it has gained unique experience in the design, production and installation of these sports facilities. Its technicians directly follow every moment of the realisation of a climbing structure: from the first conception to the engineering design, from production and installation to after-sales services; all this to guarantee a completely ‘Made in Italy’ product.

The walls of Sint Roc are the protagonists of the most recent projects of climbing gyms, which today also choose to clad their external facades with the geometric panels punctuated by coloured grips, creating a true new architectural landscape; Among the most recent are the Gaswerk Wadenswil on Lake Geneva and, in Italy, the Solid Climbing Club in Buccinasco (Milan), both of which were created with exclusively private investment and under the impetus of a true passion, which Sint Roc gladly joined in bringing to fruition.

(News by Sint Roc Srl)