What Will Paralympic Climbing Look Like in 2028?

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Last week, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) announced that paraclimbing will debut at the Paralympics in 2028 with eight medal events:

• Visual impairment: women’s B2 and men’s B1 (on a scale of 1 to 3, the level of impairment increases with lower numbers; e.g., B1 climbers are totally blind; all athletes compete in the “lead” discipline, for which they climb on toprope)
• Upper limb deficiency: women’s and men’s AU2 (reduced function/absence of forearm)
• Lower limb deficiency: women’s and men’s AL2 (limited use/loss of one lower limb)
• Range and power (RP): women’s and men’s RP1 (RP spans impairments like hypertonia, ataxia, athetosis, and impaired passive range of movement, linked to conditions like muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, and spinal cord injury)

The announcement follows the IPC’s approval last June of paraclimbing as a new addition to the 2028 Paralympic Games. The IPC also confirmed that paraclimbing will take place at the Convention Center Lot in Long Beach, Los Angeles.

In the year of waiting to learn which of the sport’s 10 total events (per gender) would run in climbing’s Paralympic debut, athletes braced themselves for a smaller selection. “Just like able-bodied climbing, odds are we’re not going to get 10 medals,” professional paraclimber Maureen Beck remembers thinking in the leadup to the news.

Beck retired from international competition in 2023 with one “giant caveat.” She planned to return to try to qualify for LA28 if her event—women’s AU2—made it through (it did). “Anywhere between three and five medals is what my gut and conversations said we would get, and then we ended up with four.”

Which Paralympic climbing in 2028 excludes

The 2028 selection excludes a dozen men and women’s International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC)-recognized paraclimbing events. The full set for both genders totals 20 events.

For the visually impaired category, the IPC omitted women’s B1, men’s B2, and B3 for both genders. For athletes with upper and lower limb deficiency, the following categories won’t compete in 2028 either: women’s and men’s AU3 (hand impairment, with one hand or multiple digits in both hands missing or with reduced function); and the women’s and men’s seated category, AL1 (athletes with no use of their lower legs). Within range and power, men’s and women’s RP2 and RP3 will also miss out.

The paraclimbing community anticipated a few of these calls, but some felt like head scratchers to climbers. Athletes have been working through different reactions, ranging from elation to heartbreak to disbelief.

“I’m not looking forward to going to Innsbruck this time, for the first time, because I know it’s going to be such a heavy environment,” says Ben Mayforth, an RP2 climber. “But I think our community really needs to do a good job of supporting the categories that are going, and then showing the IPC what their category can do in anticipation for Brisbane.”

Why paraclimbing visual impairment events differ between women and men

The IPC didn’t share rationale or details about the decision-making process with its June 3 announcement. Beck suspects that the decision probably came down to a few major questions tied to historical numbers: “Are the bigger picture disabilities all represented? That’s amputee, that’s RP, that’s visually impaired. Because each one has multiple classes, which ones have the biggest pool of athletes to pull from, and which ones have the best representation for men and women?”

Fabrizio Rossini, IFSC media and communications director, confirmed that the IPC primarily based its evaluation on participation numbers from IFSC events. “This has been a main limitation for some sports classes, which unfortunately do not have sufficient numbers of athletes and countries participating in competitions,” Rossini says.

One decision in particular—though rooted in athlete numbers—has perplexed some paraclimbers: including only women’s B2 and men’s B1 in the visual impairment category. Rossini explains: “The number of absolute athletes who participated in IFSC World Cup in the cycle 2021-2024 was not sufficient to guarantee an adequate starting list ahead of the qualification system, according to IPC parameters. Furthermore, the IPC is not in favour of combining the classes.”

Some visually impaired climbers have openly criticized the way the IPC has structured its medal event program for the 2028 Games. Emeline Lakrout, who competes in B1, questions the choice to pluck out the single B classes. For months, Lakrout says she and many of her peers expected the IPC to merge all three blind climbing classes into one and have the competitors climb blindfolded. “Getting the news that instead, there was this bizarre mishmash of different categories picked for different genders, and then an exclusion of the most blind—that was honestly very, very surprising,” Lakrout says.

Lakrout sat with the announcement on her phone for about a minute before deciding to fight it, fueled by what she describes as “routine inequity” against women’s B1. Just one example? Merging blind classes at past competitions, in which blindfolded women’s B1 climbers competed with other B-class climbers sans blindfolds. “We’ve already seen in the past, where they’ve dumped everyone in one category, and the question is, why do they not put everyone under blindfold?” Lakrout says. “Well, it would disadvantage those who are not used to it. So instead, the natural status quo was to disadvantage the B1s—those with the most severe disabilities.”

As a disability advocate, Lakrout is collecting athlete signatures for a petition to challenge the decision. “I personally get extremely fired up when I see a situation where the most disabled are being marginalized and shut out,” she says. “Literally, the IPC is saying I am too blind to climb.”

The paraclimbing community is tight knit, so the athletes who still have the chance to head to Los Angeles in 2028 are balancing excitement with empathy for those who won’t compete. Kyle Long, an AL2 climber whose class will run, wishes he could see AL1 and RP2 climbers on the wall at the Paralympics. The seated category’s omission was another surprising call to climbers. “AL1 climbers—visually, athletically, in every way, they’re the best of our sport,” Long says.

Personal heartbreak, collective joy

After learning that the RP2 category didn’t make it through, Mayforth has tried to keep things in perspective. “The way we’re reacting to it, we need to show ourselves grace and the community grace,” he says. “We all got to be part of this big push. We all put work into it, made sure categories were as competitive as possible, so that we could have these opportunities.”

Emmett Cookson, head coach of the U.S. national paraclimbing team, echoes that sentiment. “We want to keep focusing on what’s in front of us,” he told the team. “No classifications are being taken away from the World Championships. It’s still paraclimbing, through and through.”

From here, Paralympic climbers still await more information about country quotas per event and the qualification process. The IPC also still needs to announce whether the Games will include a separate series of qualifying events, as seen in Olympic climbing in 2024.

However it all unfolds, Beck remains optimistic. “I really hope that all of us—whether you’re going or not—are even more charged to keep growing the sport,” she says. “So the IPC has to say, ‘Holy crap, not only did you guys knock it out of the park at ‘28, you’re our favorite new sport.’ Just how climbing did at Tokyo and Paris. They doubled their medal count, now they have three in ‘28. My guess is by ‘32 we’ll have at least six. By ‘36, we could have the full 10.”