The Olympic sport with an eating disorder

They had something in common. The athletes depicted in the photos she grew up admiring were all thin—maybe too thin.

“I thought I needed to look like them to get to the top," said Coxsey, who represented Great Britain in sport climbing at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago. “I’d use the images to help me through hunger and inspire me to eat less and train more."

The most alarming part of Coxsey’s experience is how completely normal it is among climbers. Virtually everyone in the niche world of elite sport climbing—an athletic endeavor where the entire point is to defy the laws of gravity—has a story to tell about having an unhealthy relationship with weight.

The issue of disordered eating among the competitors has long simmered under the surface, existing as an open secret within the insular climbing community, said Alannah Yip, a 30-year-old Canadian climber. “It’s been a part of the culture of the sport for longer than I’ve been alive," she said.

But in the run-up to the Paris Games, the situation burst into public view, resulting in two of the sport’s top doctors resigning in protest and climbing’s biggest star publicly calling for reform.

“With help, I stopped starving myself," said Coxsey, who now serves as the president of the athletes’ commission for the International Federation of Sport Climbing. “But even still now, it haunts me."

American Kai Lightner began hearing about his size from the age of nine or 10. He was a child prodigy in the sport, but those around him were quick to tell him it wouldn’t last. Lightner’s father is 6-foot-9, and coaches made it clear that despite his preternatural talent, he would eventually become too tall—and therefore too heavy—to climb at the top level.

From that point on, Lightner’s obsession became finding a way to extend his window. By 12 or 13, he began engaging in dangerous practices to stay light even as he grew taller. At one doctor’s appointment at the age of 14, he was told he was “a fraction away from liver failure and that I need to improve my eating habits to survive."

He would go on to suffer multiple back fractures and other unusual injuries because of how he was treating his body. For a long time, Lightner didn’t realize he had a problem, because so many of his climbing peers were dealing with similar issues

At first, Lightner felt faster as he lost weight. But before long he became so thin that he no longer had enough strength to climb as well as before. His solution was to become even lighter.

“Suddenly," Lightner said, “you’re in a cycle you can’t get out of."

On July 5 of last year, Volker Schöffl, a German doctor who had long served on the medical commission for the IFSC, sent the Instagram post that rocked sport climbing to its core. He, along with commission president Eugen Burtscher of Austria, had resigned. The reason was what they viewed as the IFSC leadership’s unwillingness to address the culture of unhealthy weight loss in the sport.

A couple of weeks later, Janja Garnbret of Slovenia—the gold medalist in Tokyo and arguably the best competition climber ever—posted on her Instagram, “Do we want to raise the next generation of skeletons?" Gambret, who will try to defend her Olympic championship in Paris on Saturday, wrote that malnutrition in the sport urgently needed to be addressed.

She isn’t the only climber who feels that way.

“We’re afraid someone will die on the climbing mats before someone is actually pulled from competition," said Sean McColl, who competed for Canada in Tokyo and is now vice president of the IFSC athletes’ commission.

Schöffl says he and other doctors tried to establish stricter protocols to keep underweight athletes from participating but felt stonewalled by the IFSC. Though the IFSC had been monitoring climbers’ BMIs, the only repercussion for being below the threshold was a letter sent to their national federation. The IFSC argued that BMI was an imprecise measurement of health and that sanctions wouldn’t be legally defensible.

“The athletes were constantly addressing us and saying, ‘Why don’t you do anything as medical commission?’" Schöffl said.

The IFSC believes it has. It passed new regulations in February designed to combat Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport—a condition known as RED-S. All athletes must now receive a health certificate from their national federations and fill out questionnaires. There is no more mandatory BMI testing.

To Naama Constantini, the IFSC’s new top doctor, high-level sports are inherently risky and frequently come with long-term health problems as an occupational hazard. Almost every elite athlete, Constantini said, “is doing harm for his future."

Climbers are no exception, and Constantini accepts that some climbers will have unnaturally low BMIs. But as far as Constantini is concerned, that isn’t enough immediately to ban them from competing.

“Even if somebody purposely loses weight in order to win, as long as he’s not endangering his life, I do not have a good enough reason to tell him, ‘You cannot compete," she said.

The best approach, Constantini says, is to attack the problem organically. In climbing, that could mean creating routes that require more strength and power over anything else, which would disincentivize athletes from losing too much weight.

But even then, Constantly recognizes it will be a struggle. It is easy to change the rules of the sport. Changing a culture is another matter altogether.

"It is very difficult to change the beliefs of people," Constantini said. “If we have good, strong climbers that are not fighting their weight, they will show the way."