Tokyo (AFP)

Entering with fanfare into the Olympic arena, the brothers Mickael and Bassa Mawem slipped into the final of climbing on Tuesday, a new sport of the Tokyo Olympics, with a cocktail of puzzling events for pure specialists.

"It's a rather brutal format" as if "we were running a 100 m and a 1,500 m" to the same athletes, summed up in the mixed zone the Australian Tom O'Halloran, his fingers burned by this sequence in the wetness of the Japanese capital.

In this game, the French Mickaël Mawem, 30, took the lead in the general classification by improving his speed record (3rd) then by flying over the bouldering event (1st), securing a place among the eight candidates for the Thursday's podium even before the difficulty test (11th).

"These last two years, after my qualification, I trained just for that day", he confided, radiant to have been able "to give everything energetically, nervously", taking "the right decisions at the right time. ".

Sheet on climbing, which made its debut at the Tokyo Olympics Laurence CHU AFP

Winner in 2018 and 2019 of the Speed ​​World Cup, his brother Bassa, 36, had dominated this first event by climbing the 15 m high wall in 5 sec 45. But he struggled en bloc (18th) and, above all, injured his arm in difficulty (20th), making his presence in the final uncertain.

- Vertical sprint -

For the twenty climbers competing in Tokyo, the hour was historic: born in the mountains, descended into a cliff then reinvented on the urban resin walls, where it is enjoying growing success, climbing is making its debut at the Games.

But if this discipline, one of the few to defy gravity, acquired the status of "additional sport" and the assurance of being also present during the Olympics-2024 in Paris, it was with a minimum quota and a only podium by gender.

Mickael Mawem competing in rock climbing at the Tokyo Games, August 3, 2021 MOHD RASFAN AFP

Hence the formidable "combined" designed to bring together the three specialties present in the World Cup - speed, bouldering and difficulty - so different that no competitor had previously combined them at a high level.

"There are so many different ways to climb," recalled Czech star Adam Ondra, 5th in qualifying.

"You can climb a wall a meter or a mile, and it will always be climbing."

To start the ball rolling, the climbers competed in the most telegenic event: speed, a vertical sprint made up of power and automatisms, repeated a thousand times on a course always identical, until reaching on each support the precision of a gymnast.

- High school student and acrobat -

But the hierarchy was shaken by the four passages in "block", so many puzzles to be solved in five minutes and without belaying on a wall 4.5 meters high, pushing to the extreme the risk-taking and creativity.

The French imperial Bassa Mawem in climbing, a new Olympic discipline, on August 3, 2021 in Tokyo Mohd RASFAN POOL / AFP

And we saw the whole range offered by this laboratory of movement: successions of throws, head down passages, suspended by the tips of slippers, bloody hands and falls a few centimeters from happiness.

With Mickael Mawem and the Japanese Tomoa Narasaki (finally 2nd) at the helm, it remained to face the Grail of the purists, a link between the room and the exploits on cliffs: difficulty.

Led to the foot of the 15 m high wall to discover and memorize it, the climbers had six minutes and one attempt to tackle it, balancing power and technical accuracy, their arms burned by lactic acid.

The hour of the voltigeurs had arrived: that of the powerful Austrian Jakob Schubert, 30 years old and brought back to 4th place overall, or the American prodigy Colin Duffy, 17 years old and 3rd overall: "to be in high school while preparing for the Games, it was clearly a challenge, "he said.

© 2021 AFP