Paris Olympics: He climbed a wall in world-record time, but didn't win gold

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LE BOURGET, France — Sam Watson climbed a 49-foot overhanging wall in 4.74 seconds here on Thursday and didn’t win Olympic gold.

He scurried up a beyond-vertical surface like a supersized squirrel, and completed this standardized “speed climbing” course quicker than any human ever had.

He descended back to earth as the fastest man in the fastest Olympic sport, and thousands of fans rose to salute him.

And then, minutes later, he forced a smile with a bronze medal draped around his neck.

Watson, an 18-year-old Texan, didn’t quite know how to process the strange dichotomy. “I haven't really gone through it,” he said here at Le Bourget climbing site. He had mastered this wild, blink-of-an-eye sport but also suffered in its ridiculously fine margins.

“Speed climbing is most likely the lowest margin-of-error sport in the entire Olympic Games,” he said, a couple hours after he and fellow climbers proved it.

Take, for instance, a quarterfinal race between the reigning world champion, Italy’s Matteo Zurloni, and China’s Peng Wu. They heard the starting buzzer. They bolted toward the sky, using each wall’s 20 red hand-holds and 11 smaller foot-holds to propel them upward. They slapped a timing panel at virtually the same time, and looked up to see a clock that had extended to three decimal places.

Zurloni's 4.997 was red, and "whoa, f***," he thought. He brought his hands to his head as he floated back down to earth, controlled by a harness.

Peng, five feet away, was “excited.” His clock was green, and read 4.995.

Watson, meanwhile, cruised through his quarterfinal. He’d set a world record, with a time of 4.75 seconds, in qualification heats earlier in the week. But here, minutes later, in a semifinal against Peng, near the top of a gravity-defying obstacle course he’d scaled thousands of times, he was “a few little millimeters off a certain hold,” he said. It cost him a bit of power and, he estimates, 0.2 seconds. He lost to Peng by 0.08.

"I just lost the most important match of my life," Watson thought.

But he had no time to dwell on the thought. “Now I have the next most important race of my life, back-to-back, in five minutes,” he said.

And in that race, his last of this rapid-fire Olympic competition, in the “small final,” he lowered his own world record by 0.01 seconds, touching in 4.74.

A minute after that, Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo went 4.75 in the big final. Peng went 4.77. All were faster than anybody had ever been before this week.

In speed climbing, the path of the course is always the same, never varying. That allows for muscle memory to build and perfection to be pursued.

Watson's goal, he said, is to someday scale the wall in less than 4.6 seconds. (Zurloni said he thinks that eventually, speed climbers will hit 4.4.) That's what he's been training to do for years, perhaps ever since he picked up the sport at age 5. He has put hour after hour into it. He has embraced a sport that often doles out gnarly injuries — lost fingernails, sprained toe, bloody cuts, banged-up knees — and doesn't let its practitioners stop for anything.

Along the way, he has come to terms with the margins. “It is 30 movements at max speed, so there can be mistakes,” he said.

Nothing, though, could have prepared him for the storm of “complicated” emotions he felt Thursday.

“You do come here with a goal of winning gold,” he acknowledged hours after winning bronze. He felt something — he couldn’t quite express what — when gold slipped away.

“But,” after breaking the world record five minutes later, “I really did soak it in,” Watson said. He hugged coaches and family. He sought out a board displaying his time, and asked organizers to arrange “a photo Usain Bolt-style.” He wanted to give a “very big shoutout to them for letting my crazy ideas happen.”

And "to be an Olympic medalist, and to hold it in my hand, with a piece of the original Eiffel Tower, nobody will ever take that away from me," he said, as the processing began. "No one will ever take away any of the four world records I've broken. It will be with me for life."