Bouldering All Over The World

Brandwatch Bulletin #14: Bouldering All Over The World

How Japan is setting the route.

23 October 2020

Welcome to Friday’s bulletin. Today we’re looking at the sport of bouldering and how it attempts to recover in the wake of Covid-19.

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Climbing up newsfeeds

In January it looked like bouldering was going to take off in 2020. VICE wrote an article about its rise in popularity, while our colleagues noted how busy it was getting at their local climbing centre. It looked like it was going to be a big year for the sport

Then Covid-19 arrived.

If you’re not sure what bouldering is, it’s essentially rock climbing with no ropes. It’s popularity over the decades has grown massively, particularly due to the advent of artificial, indoor climbing walls and the rise of the climbing gym.

Obviously a bunch of people putting their hands all over the same holds is the exact opposite of what you want people to do in a pandemic. And as Covid-19 spread, gyms either closed themselves down, or had to shut due to lockdowns. This financially imperiled a lot of businesses.

Now that climbing centres have been reopening again, did Covid-19 disrupt the hype?

Both searches and social media posts about bouldering have been recovering since the end of April. While they haven’t reached their January levels just yet, they are trending in that direction.

This will give hope to bouldering gyms that have had to adopt measures that significantly reduce the number of customers they can accommodate. For example, the gym nearest to our Brighton office only allows a certain amount of climbers in at one time. This number, while safer, is far below what they saw pre-pandemic.

Looking at mentions across different languages, we found something surprising. A huge chunk of the bouldering conversation is being driven by Japanese speakers. There were nearly twice as many mentions of “ボルダリング” (the Japanese word for bouldering) than there were of “bouldering” in English.

Considering the number of Japanese speakers in the world is just 126m, it’s astounding how much of the online bouldering conversation they make up. But if we look at the history of the sport in Japan, we can see why.

If we look at the IFSC Climbing World Cup, we can see that Japanese competitors have been hugely successful at both men’s and women’s bouldering in recent years. Japan is clearly a country that takes bouldering seriously.

We took a closer look at mentions of “ボルダリング” to see how bouldering is faring among Japanese speakers specifically.

While English-language mentions of bouldering have remained fairly steady over the years, we found Japanese mentions have been trending down. But it looks like this could be reversing post-pandemic.

Usually Japanese bouldering mentions jump in summer, but this year that didn’t happen (presumably because of Covid-19). After years of diminishing mentions, you’d expect that to worsen after a lost summer, but that’s not the case.

Numbers have quickly recovered and are just above January levels. And there are early signs of mentions being higher this year than the one before, bucking the downwards trend.

To sum up, the Japanese bouldering scene is looking healthier than you’d have predicted back in January. It’s possible the disruption of Covid-19 had people looking for new activities, reviving consumer interest in the sport.

Next year the rescheduled 2020 Olympics will take place in Tokyo, and it’s the first year climbing is included. If interest sustains itself over the winter and into next year, 2021 could be a huge year for the sport in Japan, and for the rest of the world too.

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