Climbing
6 secrets to Janja Garnbret’s status as a climbing legend
Simply put, Slovenian Olympic champion Janja Garnbret leads the world right now in climbing. Find out what makes her so special and why she's only just getting started.
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Few climbers are made like Janja Garnbret on the sport climbing circuit. At 25, the Slovenian climber continues to amaze – and crush the competition – at pretty much any discipline she faces. She's become the woman to beat when it comes to both Bouldering and Lead disciplines.
Garnbret's dominance of climbing competitions goes back to 2016, when at 17 she went on to top the IFSC (International Federation of Sport Climbing) World Cup overall standings in Lead after taking four World Cup wins in the season. She'd top the World Cup in Lead also in 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2022. Between 2016 and 2019 she was also World Cup champion in the combined Bouldering and Lead category. She added the World Cup overall in Bouldering to her list in 2019, winning all six World Cup events in Bouldering to complete the first season sweep in IFSC history. In 2022 she dominated the climbing competitions at the new multi-sport European Championships, with gold medals in Lead, Bouldering, plus the combined Bouldering and Lead title.
Garnbret en route to treble gold at the 2022 Euro Championships in Munich
© Phil Pham/Red Bull Content Pool
World Championships titles still mean something to me
The clincher in her career so far, however, comes in the form of Olympic gold. Firstly, Garnbret conquered nerves and overcame the year-long delay to claim gold in Tokyo. Then she repeated the trick in Paris to take gold again with a peerless performance. Forget being the best female climber in the world, Garnbret is one of the best climbers in the world, period.
Added to that were more wins on the IFSC World Cup circuit in 2023, including taking the gold medal in the combined Bouldering and Lead competition at the 2023 World Championships in Bern, Switzerland. Garnbret also won the separate Bouldering event in Switzerland. The Slovenian now has eight senior World Championship titles across Lead, Bouldering and combined Bouldering and Lead.
Commenting on that win in Bern, Garnbret remarked: "World Championships titles still mean something to me. It is so hard to climb your best under this kind of pressure to be in the top three to qualify [for Paris]. I was so happy on the wall."
The seventh season of Reel Rock follows the dramatic twists and turns of Garnbret’s career to date, exploring what makes such an elite level athlete tick and what it took to make history in the high-intensity world of World Cup climbing. Below, we break down why the Slovenian is the best-of-the-best.
Watch part one of Janja Garnbret's Reel Rock episode in the player above and part two below.
23 min
The perfect season part 2
Janja Garnbret has been dominating the climbing competition scene. Can she complete the perfect season?
01
She’s been climbing since she could walk
Garnbret is in this for life. In fact, she started out climbing the door frames in her childhood home in Slovenia. Naturally this became a bit of an issue for her parents, who encouraged her to take up climbing properly at elementary school, where she graduated from climbing trees and furniture to indoor climbing.
“As a child, I wanted to be the best in everything,” Garnbret says. “I wanted it to be the best in school. I had to have the best grades. Then I wanted to be the best in the school athletic competitions, in track and field. I just wanted to be the best. Then I kind of realised I can’t be the best at everything – I have to focus on one thing. And I chose climbing.”
Enrolling on a climbing course, she quickly mastered the techniques of the sport. By the end of elementary school, she had made the Slovenian Youth Climbing Team and she crowned her first season with the title of European Junior Champion in 2013.
To become the best, Garnbret had to focus on one sport
© Erich Spiess / ASP / Red Bull Content Pool
As a child, I wanted to be the best in everything
02
She’s been collecting trophies from the start
As well as bagging European Junior Champion while still at school, Garnbret went on to win almost two dozen world class awards in her early years. Between 2014 and 2016 she had a remarkable triple gold streak at the World Junior Championships before going on to win most of her IFSC competitions in 2016.
She continued to make her mark into 2017, winning the World Cup in Lead and Combined; the Combined title in the European Championships and finishing second in Bouldering in both the World Cup and the European Championships.
03
She’s critically adored
It isn’t just the fans and judges who rate Garnbret so highly. The Slovenian Sports Journalists Association named her its athlete of the year in 2018 and rightly so. But the plaudits didn’t end there; in 2019 she was the recipient of the Bloudk Award for Outstanding International Achievement – a huge honour, especially for someone so young.
That same year, Garnbret went on to perhaps her biggest victory yet, winning six consecutive boulder-climbing victories, becoming the World Champion in both Bouldering and Difficulty climbing.
Garnbret in action at the IFSC World Cup in Austria
© Erich Spiess / ASP / Red Bull Content Pool
When I climb, you can see the happiness in me
04
She made history in Tokyo
After a huge delay due to Covid, it’s somewhat of an understatement to say the 2020 Olympic athletes were feeling the pressure when the Games did eventually roll around in summer 2021. This was certainly true for Garnbret. Not only was she climbing as a woman and a Slovenian, she was also representing her sport in its first appearance on sport's biggest stage.
But, if she was feeling nervous on the day you wouldn't have noticed it. Her bouldering and lead performances were assured, and she comfortably solved two out of the three bouldering problems while not a single other climber managed to solve even one. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, she then climbed higher than any other competitor to secure the victory.
“It feels like you're not thinking about anything,” she says. “You just enjoy yourself, enjoy being on the wall, enjoy the moves. You're just actually enjoying who you are – who you are and what you like doing.”
05
She’s an all-rounder
Garnbret isn’t just about competitions. In fact, she wants to climb as many of the world’s toughest rock formations as possible. Oh, and the occasional chimney…
Confused? Don’t be; in 2020 Garnbret teamed up with fellow Slovenian Domen Škofic to take on the 360 Ascent project, which saw the duo scale the world's longest artificial multi-pitch route 360m up Europe's tallest chimney.
Watch Janja Garnbret and Domen Škofic scale the tallest artificial multi-pitch route in the world.
48 min
360 Ascent
Climbers Janja Garnbret and Domen Škofic scale the tallest artificial multi-pitch route in the world.
Skōfic had been trying to climb the chimney – the tallest of its kind on the continent – for six years. When he got the all-clear, Garnbret was his natural first choice for a climbing partner for the marathon ascent.
06
Garnbret dedication to her sport is almost unparalleled
“There's nothing better than training hard, then doing what you couldn't do a month ago, three months or a year ago,” she says. “What motivates me is the progress.”
"My life would be pretty depressing without climbing,” she continues. “I know that’s true because when I do climb, you can see the happiness in me.”
Best of all, she knows that, like life, climbing is all about getting up again when you fall down. “99 percent of my training is falling,” she says. “Training for climbing means falling over and over again.” That, truly, makes for a winning attitude.
Watch Reel Rock: The Perfect Season Part 1 and Part 2 here
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