Tapio Alhonsuo remembers last January when he participated in the Ice Climbing World Cup with Enni Bertling, Mira Alhonsuo And Albert Kaikkonen as the first Finnish participants.
Finland had no competitor at the Ice World Cup Never. It was just ugly.
Competing in the Ice World Cup has been a lifelong dream of mine.
This first occurred to me maybe seven or eight years ago. I knew at the time that I was in good shape, and I was young and inexperienced enough to think that would be all I needed. But I couldn’t afford to participate at that time, so I had to wait.
That dream was replaced over the years, as snowy peaks and frozen cracks began to inspire me more than the cut bolts I had at hand. I thought I was done with it – that my sport climbing days were over, no matter if it was on a sunny rock or with axes in hand. I was 100% happy to focus on traditionally protected routes, longer ice falls and occasional mountain trips.
But it wasn’t over yet and I’m happy about it. The annual drytooling competitions held in Helsinki reignited the competitive flame, and this season I had the resources to participate in international competitions. It also really bothered me that Finland didn’t have a competitor at the Ice World Cup. Never. It was just ugly. We had ice in Finland, and some might say there was plenty of it in the North. Yes, I felt like it had to be done, that there had to be a Finnish team in the IWC.
At the end of last January, a national team of four Finnish ice climbers was formed. We first went to Saas-Fee (SUI), then to Rabenstein (ITA), for our very first Ice World Cup competition. Like the very first Finns!
The day before the Saas-Fee competition was incredibly exciting. Not because anything exciting happened at that time, no; only because my mind was full of question marks. We’ve all had it. We didn’t know how the next day would end. I was afraid I had no idea how much escalation we were going to face.
I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make a single move on the qualifying course.
Of course, I had spent the previous months with only this goal in mind. These months had been carefully planned, but I wasn’t sure how the power gained from our training would transfer to the competition walls. I had spent hours studying YouTube and Vimeo trying to understand what was needed. I had tried to see the nuances and tried to implement these techniques in our training cave, but there was no way of knowing how it would work in real life. In the competition.
Nobody in Finland knew this.
My last moments in the Saas-Fee isolation zone were filled with mixed emotions.
First of all, I was very happy to have made it this far. I was truly coming out of isolation within minutes and was about to go do something I had wanted to do for years. I had prepared as best I could, with the limited knowledge and training facilities we had. And I was very satisfied with the journey that had led me to this point. All the training, all the months in our cave, and all the years I had axes in my hand, it would all soon culminate in a single performance. If I were to screw it up, there wouldn’t be a second time. It would then be someone else’s turn.
Was I good enough? Was I minutes away from total humiliation? What am I about to do on a global live stream only to show that I couldn’t get off the ground?
I was a little embarrassed by my anxiety. I thought I would have enough experience to not stress too much about a situation like this. I had lost a good night’s sleep many times earlier in my mountaineering life, usually because I was so afraid of the next day. But being scared by a scary mountain road was a different fear than this.
Objectively, I had nothing to fear. There would be no mountainside above me threatening to trigger an avalanche when the afternoon sun was shining. There would be no bad pro or no-fall zone. There would be no complex descent involving downhill while abseiling was not an option due to lack of pro.
But I had to do my best and I should use everything I had learned.
What am I doing here, among these pros? These guys have crew chiefs and doctors and trainers and team jackets and decades of experience in this shit! What do we have, we paid for this shit ourselves?
Of course, I failed in the way I hated the most. Both axes in hand, which means I slipped. If I had only had one ax with me, that would have meant I would have slipped off my axe, which is always a whole different story. If that had been the case, the cause of the failure would have been a pump or movement that I was unable to do. I would have preferred that. But no, I had them both.
But there were so many things I knew better now. I now knew what it felt like to hit my frontpoints on the plywood, or why we were allowed to have binoculars in the route overview. I also knew the pace of climbing necessary if I one day wanted to dream of a semi-final. This may not sound like much, but they were just huge question marks before we finally took those first steps on a real wall of models.
Competitive ice climbing has evolved significantly from traditional ice climbing and mixed climbing. The ability to use feet effectively on overhanging plywood is a skill you won’t learn by pointing toward the front of the ice. Reading sequences and memorizing them from below seems to be an art form in itself. This is all very specific to sport, it’s something you learn best by practicing it. And I liked it, because ice climbing presented its most athletic aspect.
There was no room for bullshit or just speculation. The conditions and rules were the same for everyone. No gray area if something has been climbed or not. Come evening, everyone was ranked from best to worst, and it was your job to do your best.
That’s why it’s called competitive ice climbing, and that’s why I love it.
Tapio Alhonsuo is an ice cream and crack enthusiast living in Rovaniemi, Finland. You can follow him on Instagram @rollomixed.
The Finnish team ranked as follows in Saas-Fee and Rabenstein:
Tapio Alhonsuo (Saas-Fee 45/61, Rabenstein 45/69)
Mira Alhonsuo (Saas-Fee 21/34, Rabenstein 27/36)
Enni Bertling (Saas-Fee 28/34, Rabenstein 24/36)
Albert Kaikkonen (Saas-Fee 55/61, Rabenstein 57/69)