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Last week, Jakob Schubert livestreamed his first ascent of Project Big, a much-hyped open project in Flatanger, Norway. Today he gave the route a proper name—B.I.G.—and proposed a grade—9c [5.15d]. This makes Schubert the third person to propose the grade, after Adam Ondra (Silence, 2017) and Seb Bouin (DNA, 2022). Though Stefano Ghisolfi is sieging his way toward the second ascent of Silence, no 5.15d has been repeated to date.
Grades are interesting, and scary, and hard to pin down. During the two months Schubert spent on the climb, it was not always clear to him whether B.I.G. warranted the world’s hardest grade. When Ondra and Schubert began sussing the line together in 2022, both climbers initially suspected—and hoped—that B.I.G. could be 5.15d; but the beta came together pretty quickly, and within two weeks both Ondra and Schubert were “feeling pretty close.” Once they began falling on the crux throw, after which since they believed the route was essentially over, they started to think it was a bit easier. But then neither of them sent, and when Schubert returned this year, B.I.G. still didn’t go down quickly.
“In hindsight, I don’t even think we were actually that close [last year],” he wrote on Instagram. “Knowing how my attempts unfolded this season puts things into a different perspective.” He ended up sticking the crux move multiple times from the ground, only to fall higher in the same sequence—and then nearly fell on the 5.13b/c outro after encountering one wet hold and breaking another.
“B.I.G. feels so strange to grade because it really doesn’t feel that bad if you try just the moves,” he wrote on his The Crag account. “The crux is a [V12] boulder problem, and by now I have it dialed so well that I can do it easily, even multiple times in a row. But because of the very powerful style of the boulder it’s way more difficult to do it after 80+ moves of climbing.”
Schubert—who, amazingly, had never previously failed to send a project during a single trip—spent nearly two months on B.I.G. over two seasons, but after finally clipping the chains and acknowledging that “this was the biggest mental battle that I have ever had,” he still wasn’t sure about the actual grade—in part because he simply hasn’t tried that many comparably difficult routes. Though often considered primarily a comp climber (he’s won a mind-boggling 49 gold medals; won the 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2018 Combined World Cup seasons; been the four-time Lead and two-time Combined World Champion; and taken Olympic bronze), Schubert has also put together one the largest and most impressive outdoor ticklists of all time, having sent dozens of 5.15s, hard deep water solos, and boulders up to V15. But despite his astonishingly successful career, Schubert’s sole reference for difficulty beyond the 5.15b grade is Perfecto Mundo, which is one of the few confirmed* climbs of its grade.
And he isn’t alone in feeling inexperienced above 5.15b: The 5.15c and 5.15d grades are new to the entire community, and the borders between them are still being defined. “The range for grades up to 9b [5.15b] seem to have settled due to the [large number] of routes and ascents,” he wrote on The Crag. “This doesn’t yet seem [to be] the case for 9b+ [5.15c] and 9c [5.15d], where the possibilities for comparison are still very limited. There are not even 10 climbers that claim to have sent 9b+, and the total of routes graded 9b+ or harder is still below 15, most of which are yet to see repeats. This makes it obvious that confines for both 9b+ and 9c are still blurry and will develop over time and through ascents and shared opinions.”
Still, though, when Schubert compared Perfecto Mundo with B.I.G., there was no comparison: Perfecto Mundo “felt way easier to me.” By the time he sent B.I.G. he had the route totally dialed. “I felt at a point where I had found the most efficient way possible for me. … I didn’t see any room for improvement. So all that it came down to was my physical and mental shape which I think are very good right now.”
Given these facts, and after consulting further with Adam Ondra, the only other climber to invest a significant amount of time into the climb, Schubert was forced to conclude that “it feels right to propose 9c.”
*Perfecto Mundo has been climbed by Alex Megos, Stefano Ghisolfi, and Jakob Schubert, while repelling significant effort from pedigreed folks like Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, and Jorge Díaz-Rullo.
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