Alex Puccio and Jernej Kruder win the Rock Master KO Boulder Contest

KO BOULDER WOMEN
Boulder KO System. Put in other words, bouldering Rock Master style. An extremely fast formula, cruel even if you want. Easy to understand. There are 4 problems, and the athletes have tried them this morning for about 1 hour and a half. Each boulder is a hurdle in its own right, in a sense that the worst climber is eliminated. A mere three attempts are allowed to solve the rebus. In short: adrenaline buzzes, the stakes are high and, above all, mistakes cost dearly... because there's no second chance. This isn't a game of the fainthearted...

- READ THE COMPLETE REPORT ON WWW.ROCKMASTERFESTIVAL.COM



KO BOULDER MEN
11 men are in the line-up for this afternoon’s Rock Master Boulder KO System. Three are destined to leave after the first problem, which seems a complex puzzle of small volumes and pyramids that, like stalactites, strut out from the overhanging face. Both Dmitrii Sharafutdinov and Rustam Gelmanov immediately reach the dyno that leads to the sloping top, but they fail to match this. That last hold must be a real cruncher if the two Russians can’t hold it. But then along comes Slovenia’s Jernej Kruder and he sticks it… statically. The power of bouldering. But that final hold, even with Kruder’s method, proves elusive. In fact Jeremy Bonder, James Kassay, Kokoro Fujii, Gabriele Moroni, Makoto Yamauchi, Gregor Vezonik and Michael Piccolruaz all fall there. Rei Sugimoto from Japan shows how it’s done by clinching it first go. So all the rest need to try again.

- READ THE COMPLETE REPORT ON WWW.ROCKMASTERFESTIVAL.COM