Finding new creative solutions is a key component in world-class competitive bouldering

Bouldering is a sport climbing discipline in which short, extremely difficult climbing routes, so-called boulder problems, have to be mastered. Besides excellent physical condition, the ability to read a boulder and to generate motor solutions for the boulder problem is probably a performance-determining factor. In a full survey of all participants of the 2017 Bouldering World Cups we investigated how athletes deal with an unsuccessful first attempt. We distinguish between follow-up attempts in which athletes retry the same solution as before and follow-up attempts in which they find a new solution. We could show that the success rate of new solutions is substantially higher than the repetition of the old solution. Furthermore, there is a correlation with the frequency of finding new solutions and the position in the world ranking. We conclude that the ability to create several solutions for boulder problems is a very important component of performance in bouldering.