Olympian Toby Roberts Is Sparking Interest in Climbing in the U.K.

Not every Olympic gold medal is won by an athlete who can spark a surge of interest in their sport of choice. There are some athletes and some sports where there’s a pleasure to be taken in simply watching a great athlete attempt something that looks impossible — and succeed in doing so. But there’s also a related phenomenon, that of spectators watching a great athlete do their thing and thinking, “Hey, that looks like fun.” And in this case, Toby Roberts’s gold medal win in Paris this summer has promoted a surge in interest in climbing in the U.K.

That’s the big takeaway from a recent article by The Observer‘s Kate McCusker. As McCusker reports, a number of climbing centers across the U.K. are seeing an uptick in interest in the wake of Roberts’s performance. There are a number of factors at work here, including the fact that he’s the first male British climber to qualify for the Olympics. And, as befits an athlete who hasn’t yet turned 20, much of the interest in climbing covered in The Observer‘s article has come from a younger generation of athletes.

Other climbing enthusiasts, young and old, also testified as to the increasing popularity of their chosen sport. “It’s cool that my friends now know the name of a climber,” the 11-year-old climber Oliver Scott told The Observer. “Before he got gold they didn’t know many.”

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The growth in popularity for the sport can also be seen as part of a global increase in climbing — though as Samuel Long noted at INDY Week earlier this year, the U.K. was also home to one of the first indoor climbing faciltiies, which opened its doors in 1968. Long also cited data to the effect that climbing gyms have grown by 76% from 2014 to 2023 in the U.S. If Roberts’s medal accelerates that on the other side of the Atlantic, who knows what heights that industry might reach?