Silence

The definitive record of the ascent that moved the sport's scale, and Ondra made it himself. On September 3, 2017, in the Hanshelleren cave at Flatanger, Adam Ondra clipped the chains of Silence, 45 meters of severely overhanging granite linking boulder problems around 8C, 8B and 7C+, and proposed 9c. At the film's release nobody had repeated it. Bernardo Giménez shoots.

This is for anyone who wants to know what the hardest climb in the world looks like, and for climbers curious about the strangeness of the route rather than just the number: an inverted kneebar rest, the bat hang, that Ondra trained for by having his physiotherapist fold him into position on a gym floor. Skip it if you want drama. Eighteen minutes walks the route section by section and trusts the climbing.

What works is the structure. Breaking the route into its three boulder problems and their rests makes 9c legible, and the send footage, complete with the scream, is one of the great moments on film in this sport. What it gets wrong is the ending. The film stops at the send, and by 2021 the story of Silence included four years of nobody repeating it. A minute on that would have helped.

La Dura Complete is the previous benchmark, Ondra and Chris Sharma on the first 9b+ in 2013. Watch it first. Silence is what happened when the student ran out of teachers.