Anglika Rainer - my upside down world

USA, China, South Korea, Switzerland, Italy and France - 6 competitions in 3 different continents, this were the numbers of the ice climbing competition season 2017.
It was an exhausting season, both physically with 5 competitons in a row, one weekend after another, but also technically as there were some new moves in the routes.
The single competition venues have been very different between each other, while the structures in Durango (USA) and China were relatively low, the structure in Cheongsong in South Corea was huge. All of these where without ice and so completely Drytooling, but the structures in Europe offered nice walls with quite a lot of ice. This year there where two new venues on the schedule, Durango and Bejing, which motivated me to participate once again in the whole Worldcup circuit. In Durango at the first competition of the season I placed 2nd. In China I did a small tecnical mistake in finals and so placed 7th, but really enjoyed the possibility of visiting the city of Bejing and especially the Great Wall. After the finals me and my boyfriend Marco immediately took a plane to Corea where we spent the following days training togehter with our Corean friends and some other athletes from the World Cup. Sadly I got sick with a strong cold and flu and it was very hard to climb qulaifications and semifinals, I was happy to qualify for finals but there my strength was not enough for podium.
Back home we had not much time to rest, after 1,5 days we left again for Switzerland. The competition in Saas Fee had been my favourite one for many years and beeing able to climb once again in finals in front of this amazing crowd gave me a lot of energy and I got 2nd.
My homecompetition in Rabenstein the following weekend was quite a disappointment. After beeing 1st in semifinals I misunderstood a move in finals, lost a lot of time and power and finished only 6th.
After this 5 competitions I placed for the 5th time on 2nd place of the Worldcup ranking.
Now only the last and most important competition of the season was left. The World Championship in Champagny, France. I must admit that my secret objective was to win my fourth Goldmedal. Nevertheless this big objective, I climbed very concentrated and tried to give my best. I climbed the route to the top but in the end my long time opponent and friend Shin Woonseon was faster by 5 seconds, which is not much on a total climbing time of 7.30 minutes. So this is my second Silver Medal that join the three Gold medals at World Championships.
Foto by Diego Patete and Patrick Schwienbacher