The Scottish phenom recently visited Adam Ondra in the Czech Republic. The mission? To see whether he could climb anything. Spoiler alert: He could.
Will Bosi flat-out crushes. He solidified his presence on the international climbing stage last year with repeats — and a first ascent — of the hardest routes at Raven Tor, England, where the climbing is heinous, to say the least. Since then, all he’s done is put up mid-5.15 routes in Siurana, Spain, plus a slew of V12 and harder boulder problems.
If you are into hard climbing but you don’t know who Bosi (pronounce it BOH-zee) is, those days are numbered. Just a few days ago, the 23-year-old climber sent every boulder problem (including ones that didn’t exist until his arrival) at a crag on Adam Ondra’s doorstep.
Crushing Czech Climbs
On one day in mid-April, Bosi flashed “Fénixovy Slzy” (8A+/V12) and “Charizard” (8B+/V14), flashed the first ascent of “The Swirl King Sit” (8A+/V12), and made the first ascent of “Bulbasaur” (8C/V15).
To say Bosi had a good climbing day is like saying Kobe Bryant had a “good” game when he dropped 81 points against the Raptors in 2006.
The reality is that Bosi was close to otherworldly — simply walking up to climbs few of us will ever contend with and summarily pulling them into the ground. One after another.
But if you ask Bosi, all he wanted to do on the trip was see if he could pull onto the tall, steep block at all.
‘Mystery’ Fuels Bosi’s Climbing
“One of the things I wondered before the trip — I was almost kind of nervous — was ‘oh, I wonder if all the grades are just really, really hard, and I’m going to come here and not to be able to do anything,” Bosi recalled, laughing. “So the mystery of it really drew me here.”
The “mystery” Bosi’s talking about is a lot bigger than numbers, though. Growing up in Edinburgh, he said, wasn’t conducive to climbing outside. The closest crag was a pile of “really, really bad,” breakable rock that didn’t at all engender climbing, let alone performance.
The only good cliffs were a 2-hour drive away. So, the young Bosi spent a lot of his time in the gym. Envisioning sequences and linking moves on plastic, he said, gave him the physiologically creative foundation his climbing now exhibits.
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