Ten days until Paris Opening Ceremony, USA Climbing ready to meet expectations
Jul 16, 2024, 4:40 PM | Updated: 7:26 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — It is just practice now, but in three weeks, Jesse Grupper knows it will be for real.
Grupper is one of the Team USA climbers who will be competing in the Paris Olympics.
“Ever since I was a kid looking at the TV screen and watching the Olympics, it was always a dream for me,” Grupper said during a recent interview.
Tuesday morning, he got in one of his final workouts before heading overseas to prepare for The Games.
He and the entire team know the United States will be a favorite this time around.
“Yeah. There is an expectation,” USA Climbing CEO Marc Norman said with a laugh. “Going into Tokyo, the US Olympic Committee did not think we would qualify. We ended up qualifying a full team.”
Instead, three US climbers made it to the finals in the Tokyo Olympics, with Nathaniel Coleman winning a silver medal.
Because of that success, Norman knows USA Climbing is no longer the underdog and has proved it to the world in competitions over the past three years.
“We have won a number of World Cup medals since that time. The expectation is that we will win and bring home some medals, plural. Not medal,” Norman said. “So, the pressure is high.”
The team will first go to Barcelona, Spain, where they have a facility lined up where they can do some training and get used to being in the same time zone as France.
They will start arriving in Spain over the next week, before heading to Paris on August 1.
The climbing events begin on August 5, more than a week after the Opening Ceremony.
With speed climbing having its own event for Paris instead of being mixed in with boulder climbing and lead climbing, that means more athletes able to qualify for the Olympics.
The United States is the only country to qualify a full team of eight climbers.
“The athletes are where they need to be,” Norman said. “I think more to your point, there is more pressure and more expectation than ever.”