This is the story of a friendship, an unexpected friendship, but a "very deep" friendship. On the one hand, Chris Sharma , one of the best climbers ever , the first to climb a 9b wall, a very blond Californian who had to have been a surfer, but discovered the mountain and ... oh, the mountain. And on the other side, Miquel Riera , a Mallorcan climber 20 years older than him, who invented a way to enjoy both the rocks and the sea, and was crazy for everyone until Sharma understood him and, suddenly, he passed to be famous. In 2004 they did not know each other and the following year, always with chalk in their hands, always with nitrate on their bodies, they no longer separated with a common idea: to show all climbers the wonders of the newpsychoblock .

But ... What is the psicobloc? Very simple: climb a cliff without rope to use the sea as cushioning for falls . A kind of boulder in a big way with the water acting as a mattress. At the end of the 70s , Riera and some of his friends from Mallorca began to experiment with the modality, to open some avenues, to make it known, but the boom only came when Sharma appeared. Today, as confirmed for example in the Rock & Water Mallorca company , hundreds of climbers come to Mallorca every year to test the experience; Nor has the coronavirus ended a trend that will soon be 20 years old .

“It all started when the Lowell brothers, who are the best at climbing movies, met Miquel during a filming in Austria. He explained what the psicobloc was and, unlike many others, who treated him as crazy, they found it interesting and decided to go to Mallorca to record. When I saw the images I said, 'Wow, I need to prove that .' And so I met Miquel and fell in love with Mallorca and the psychoblock. I was then 22 years old and I felt that I had already done everything: I had completed the most difficult routes in the world, I had won medals in World Cups ... I didn't know which way to go and the whole experience with Miquel inspired me a lot, " Sharma explains precisely. from Mallorca, where he spends a few days bonding moments on the beach with his family and moments hanging on the rock.

It is what he has been doing for 15 summers , but this time there is a difference, a great difference: Miquel is not there . The father of the psychobloc died last October at the age of 56, a victim of cancer and, after the tributes, such as the one lived in front of his house hours after his death, only the many, many lines remain, which he imagined and which amounted next to Sharma, always hand in hand, until the difficulty of the road was only within the reach of the American talent.

" This year without him was very strange . We had a great difference in age and we were very different, Miquel was a very eccentric man , a character, but we developed a very deep friendship because we shared the same passion. In fact, I traded my life for him, for the psicobloc. I learned to speak Castilian, I moved to Barcelona ... it is very strange to be without it, "says Sharma, who in fact has lived in Spain for years and, what's more, has decided to promote climbing here. In 2015, it opened a 1,900-square-meter climbing wall in Barcelona, which is already a benchmark and will increase in the coming months: in Madrid it already has a new 4,000-square-meter climbing wall ready and in Gavá, another 5,000. Both will be by far the largest in Spain, although each summer, equally, the American climber will continue to return to Mallorca.

There, also as a tribute to Riera, Sharma plans to continue opening pathways and promoting psicobloc events to expand the number of practitioners and, above all, to expose the spirit of the discipline. In a line of thought very typical of climbing, the psychoblock is not about winning or losing, it's about ... it's about ... it's about something else. " Few people understand the psychoblock because many climbers do not usually like the sea and see it as something strange. Miquel called it a psychoblock because of the psychological factor of doing bouldering, that is, a block, at high altitude and without a mattress underneath, but among us we called it marpinism. The psychoblock is adventure, it is nature, it is freedom, it is spiritual. It has no rules, you cannot narrow it down. You can climb a route and the following year the sea will have changed it, the wall will be virgin again. That is what has always attracted me, "ends Sharma, with an unexpected friendship, a" very deep "friendship, always in his chalk bag.

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