Brooke Raboutou gets silver medal in sport climbing

PARIS — Brooke Raboutou’s foot slipped on a blue hold and she fell off the climbing wall near the top. After the safety rope guided her back to earth, she started crying.

Not because she failed, but because she hadn’t.

The unique part of Olympic sport climbing is athletes are isolated in a room behind the wall, with no Bluetooth electronics allowed, and don’t know where they stand until they finish climbing. Raboutou finished Saturday in boulder and lead final, then the University of San Diego alum found out where she stood.

She was guaranteed a medal. Tears of joy.

It ultimately became silver when Slovenia’s Jana Garnbret, despite injuring a finger during the boulder rounds, got slightly farther up the lead wall than Raboutou to successfully defend her gold medal from Tokyo in 2021.

But Raboutou, who finished fifth in Tokyo and twice fell just short in qualifying before securing her Paris spot in a last-chance event, wasn’t quibbling. Silver is golden.

“Just knowing that it worked out this time,” she said. “I’ve had moments where it really didn’t, and you start to question things. It was like, ‘Is this a dream?’”

Raboutou, 23, was a close second to Garnbret in bouldering, 84.0 to 84.1 points. She was fifth best of the eight finalists in lead, her weaker event, at 72.0 for a 156.0 total.

The question then became whether Garnbret could top that making one-handed grabs supporting her entire body weight on a finger that got caught between cracks in a boulder and twisted. She thought it might be broken.

“It was very difficult,” said Garnbret, considered by many the greatest female climber in history with 75 career victories in 82 international events. “I was crying for quite some time. But then I stopped crying. I was like, ‘Janja, just focus. Just go out and do your best because the next Olympics are in four years.’

“I don’t care if I’m missing a finger, a hand or a leg, whatever, I will climb. So that’s what I did.”

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