Action Directe – News?

What makes an ascent newsworthy these days? One of the world´s best climbers repeats one of the world´s hardest and most famous climbs and it sounds pretty newsworthy. Austrian born Kilian Fischhuber has just climbed Wolfgang Gullich´s Action Directe, the benchmark f9a route anywhere on the planet. My problem is, it´s the 9th ascent including the legendary Wolfgang´s. It is the second most repeated f9a after Kinematix at Gorge Du Loup in France (10 ascents). f9a is without doubt nails, but it is no longer the absolute cutting edge – let´s face it Wolfgang established Action Directe way back in 1991 (and graded it f8c+ / 9a). Would we be reporting the 9th ascent of an E8 that was put up by Johnny Dawes in the late 80´s? Probably not. Action Directe is actually around 12 moves long, significantly shorter than many boulder problems. Dave MacLeod has established V13´s at Dumbarton with twice as many moves.So what makes Action Directe newsworthy? I call it Internet Keepy Uppies (and planetFear are as guilty of it as anybody else). Somebody climbs something hard. It gets reported on a website somewhere. Come the next morning a dozen or so climbing news-hounds sit at their computers sipping coffee and surfing the regular news sites to see if anything has happened over night. Bingo. Action Directe – that´s a famous route isn´t it. Somebody obviously thinks its worth while reporting so we better had too. Must keep up with the Joneses. Mustn´t be the one responsible for dropping the ball. And so it escalates. By lunch time a dozen sites are bigging it up to receive more attention than the first ascent! Such is the power of the Internet.———————————————————————– If you have any news worth reporting please contact Matt – matt@planetfear.com / 0114 2969114 ———————————————————————–

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