The International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) is the main governing body overseeing the sport of climbing. The IFSC organizes numerous competitions in different countries throughout the year, and the results for these competitions are recorded by the IFSC on their website, ifsc-climbing.org.
Climbing is one of the most rapidly growing sports in the world, with climbing gyms sprouting up all over North America (https://www.climbingbusinessjournal.com/gyms-and-trends-of-2017/). 2018 saw two major movies about climbing released (Free Solo and The Dawn Wall). Climbing will also be present during the 2020 Olympics in the combined format, marking the sport's first appearance in the games.
Data was scraped from ifsc-climbing.org. Code used for scraping is available at https://github.com/brkurzawa/ifsc-webscraper.
The dataset contains 4 different files, one for each main category of sport climbing, bouldering, lead, speed, and combined (combination of all 3). Each row represents a specific climber's performance for a competition. Columns vary depending on competition type, but in general results are in qualification, semi-final, and final columns. Sometimes there are multiple groups for qualifications, and when that is the case the results will be split to indicate which qualification group the climber was in.
Another category of climbing that is currently excluded due to scraping difficulties is paraclimbing. The IFSC website contains info about paraclimbing as well, and I plan to update the web scraper to gather this info at some point soon.
Thanks for IFSC for hosting competitions and storing the results on ifsc-climbing.org
There is a lot of good information here, and we could answer a lot of questions. Do certain athletes perform better in certain countries? Are there clusters of climbers that perform similarly in the same competitions, indicating a style that fit the routesetting? Which competitions were the hardest based on results? How have the speed climbing results changed over time? You might be able to come up with brand new insights and narratives that have been glossed over through the years.
