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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 11:27am PT
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This is interesting. I did some searching regarding Lance Armstrong and Clif Bar and found this. It may go aways to explaining the solo connection with the Yosemite 5.
Clif Bar's Solo Climb;
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/12/01/8192527/
Great twist at the end of the piece;
And even if going solo is a tougher game, Erickson sees one advantage that trumps all else. "We'll live with the risk," he says, "because we're having a lot more fun."
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wstmrnclmr
Trad climber
Bolinas, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 07:31pm PT
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Crankster, your one of few continuing to look at the big picture as this thread (and as so many do) wanders out onto a small limb. This is about mass marketing as it pertains to extreme sports. And the masses are the target. We (and I'm as guilty as the next) as climbers are a small microcosim of the self centered and self absorbed and free soloing is an even smaller sub set, when we put our climbing hats on. We should try and see it from the way the public at large views us and the way a company like clif bar weighs their marketing options when dealing with a larger audience that has no idea nor can relate to what Largo is talking about.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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Nov 22, 2014 - 08:23pm PT
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Largo wrote: "who, exactly, is Cliff Bar trying to protect? My point is in terms of free soling, Cliff Bar is acting soly on the grounds of perceived or potential risk..."
likely true...
but possibly not...
while i can't speak for clif bar, if i was in their position, i wouldn't be worried about protecting the "public" or the "kids".
yet i'd make the same decision... [even though i am a climber and have at points partaken in free soloing...]
i'd make the same decision because i wouldn't want to ever have to contemplate whether [in the event that the unspeakable did happen to a free soloing climber that my business sponsored] my sponsorship was the camel's hair that tipped the knife edge balancing decision away from one based on internal necessity to one based on chasing an extrinsic and ephemeral siren.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 08:34pm PT
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Along the same vein, they may actually be taking a position of not wanting to scare away potential new customer types. After reading the article I posted above it makes me wonder. It mentioned how Power Bar is going after couch potato types so.......They may actually be in the process of homogenizing their brand rather than trying to make a statement about climbing.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:00pm PT
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Must just be the ones that can hit the deck then. I was impressed by Lynn Hill in UPRISING saying how freaked she was at what Alex does.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:03pm PT
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People should remember that advertising is fundamentally false becuase the reason it exists in the first place is to sell a product. Tank the sales and the manufacturer looks for another advertising campaign. Granted, some manufacturers want to equate their braid with something real, or real people doing real things, but if the public perceivs that they are somehow reckless in their endorcements, are are at least thought to promote and encourage fatal games, then the bottom line will suffer and the games have to go.
A broader question is what Cliff Bar hoped to accomplish by associating so closely with climbing. My sense of it is, because theirs is a game of perceptions and not actual risk analysis (in terms of actual soloing deaths), once perceptions - not reality - were interpreted as being death defying (in the case of Alex's solos), this perception was bad for the brand, and under the false claim of being safe and responsible, they yanked sponsorship. Too extreme.
Red Bull, on the other hand, is clearly not frightened about promoting extreme events, and whatever else you can say about their operations, their approach is bold and in keeping with core adventure values, which have never put currency in playing it safe for all the sane and rational reasons.
JL
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:07pm PT
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Apparently they have a corporate Climbing wall at headquarters. Their view of climbing is probably not quite so extreme so it was easy to fall into that trap.
Largo, I think you mentioned that what gets said at ST would not affect Alex but it just may affect the head of Clif Bar!
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:16pm PT
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And when Bachar died soloing, he was 52 and suffering from various serious ailments, including an arm that would go dead on him. Of course people have died free soloing. This ain't canasta. But as it is practiced by experts . . . (Largo)
How do you think the general public would view this statement? Soloing as an addiction?
Clif bar made a wise decision.
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crankster
Trad climber
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:25pm PT
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Climbers still on the sponsor list...
Chris Sharma
Tommy Caldwell
Kate Rutherford
Mike Libecki
Beth Rodden
Pamela Shanti Pack
Heather Robinson
Mark Synnott
Caroline George
Freddie Robinson
Tony Renaldo
Allie Rainey
Paul Robinson
Heidi Wirtz
Gord McArthur
Looks to me like Clif is still eager to be involved in climbing.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:31pm PT
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People should remember that advertising is fundamentally false becuase the reason it exists in the first place is to sell a product.
You of course mean the part where the product gets associated with a certain activity or personality type, and that if it gets eaten, somebody's life will be changed in a big way? I don't think needing to sell a product implies that a company has to be untruthful about the product itself.
Implying that if you eat a certain food bar you become like Alex Honnold.......That could be a terrifying prospect! (for the person eating the bar)
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:32pm PT
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If sponsors back away from risky behaviors, it may well slowly mold climbing into a safer, more sterile version of what it is today.
I thought climbing today already WAS a safer more sterile version.
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McHale's Navy
Trad climber
From Panorama City, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 09:38pm PT
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When things get sterile there will always be people to break away. Clearly Alex and the other climbers and Clif Bar are not a good match, and that says nothing about either side. They need to find where they belong is all.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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Nov 22, 2014 - 10:12pm PT
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while rgold and largo have seemingly concluded that the risk of fee soloing death is, as compared to roped rock climbing, insignificant, i remain unconvinced... one way or the other...
a uk stat gives the risk of rock climbing death at 1 in 320000 climbs. [who knows whether they included alpinism, mountaineering, free soloing, etc] but because the free soloing pop is so small it's hard to know exactly how high the relative risk is...
my very rough order of magnitude guess would be that for every unroped fifth class route that is climbed there are maybe 1000 - 10000 roped climbs completed. this would mean that if the quick googling i did was correct and on average there are 25 u.s. rock climbing deaths per year than there should only be between a few and 25 u.s. free soloing deaths in the last 100 years for the risk to be comparable.
I doubt this is true... and so my suspicion is that it is not just the perception of risk that is significantly higher with regards to free soloing... rather it is the actual risk...
barring actual study all of this convo is based on perceptions and educated guesses as the source pop is so small that the extrapolation becomes perspective dependant.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Nov 22, 2014 - 10:48pm PT
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a uk stat gives the risk of rock climbing death at 1 in 320000 climbs. [who knows whether they included alpinism, mountaineering, free soloing, etc] but because the free soloing pop is so small it's hard to know exactly how high the relative risk is...
At least part of the point that Rich G. and have been making is the perception is that free soling is rarely done, when in fact most experienced climbers have and do free solo terrain that a fall would be fatal, but said solos are typically enough below the person's max that falls become improbable, to the point of approaching zero in terms of actual deaths.
Only through interviesing a huge cross section could this ever be substantiated, but how many 5.10 climbers (most active climbers can do some 5.10) have NEVER, say, soloing any 5.6 or 5.7 terrain?
You might be surprised.
JL
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wstmrnclmr
Trad climber
Bolinas, CA
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Nov 22, 2014 - 10:48pm PT
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Largo, your theory as to marketing perception for me hits the point. We have all been mesmerized by what Honnold in particular has done and how what he has done has gone to mainstream audiences. Obvuiosly marketers want to cash in. But the public or mass perception in the case of free soloing seems much different from the reality. Clifbar is more then likely well aware of the intracacies of free soloing but is also equally aware of how the public percieves it which seems entirely different or enough different that Clifbar no longer wanted to support and further the perception. In an odd way, they may be respecting more of what climbing's really about by firing them instead of fueling a mass perception of what those climbers are in reality.
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nah000
climber
no/w/here
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Nov 23, 2014 - 02:02am PT
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Largo wrote: "Only through interviesing a huge cross section could this ever be substantiated, but how many 5.10 climbers (most active climbers can do some 5.10) have NEVER, say, soloing any 5.6 or 5.7 terrain? "
while i agree with the first part of your sentence, i don't see the relevance, in and of itself, of the question in the second half...
ie. all that matters in determining relative risk are the populations relative time spent doing each activity... not the population size partaking in said activity... [if each year every single active climber free soloed once while doing another 1000 roped climbs, it wouldn't change the fact that free soloing is relatively rare.]
in that sense i don't think i would be surprised, as i agree that many, possibly even most, active climbers do occasionally [both intentionally and sometimes not] enter into the free soloing arena...
my guess would still be that the amount of free soloing that goes on is relatively small [less than 1 in 1000 pitches relative to roped climbing...] and if i had to put money on it, i'd bet that the risk of death per technical free soloed pitch is at least 10X higher than that of the risk per [non-alpine/mountaineering] technical roped rock climbing pitch... [as with all of our speculation, this is ultimately just conjecture based on extrapolation of my personal experiences.]
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Nov 23, 2014 - 03:30am PT
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When I raised the question "who is Clif Bar trying to protect?", to some extent I was expressing my near certainty that Clif Bar's decision will have absolutely no statistically measurable effect on the number of deaths from free soloing in North America. Since the data is readily available, does anyone care to take the bet? We would need to compare data from when Honnold was sponsored to a similar time frame after his sponsorship was canceled. Of course this means we would have to wait a few years for the outcome (I suppose we could also compare the data from the four years before he was hired to the data for the four years he was supported to see if there was an associated increase in free soloing deaths).
Like I mentioned before, the data suggests that the large majority of serious accidents in rock climbing occur to sport climbers and people climbing moderate trad, so this makes me wonder: why isn't it irresponsible for Clif Bar to sponsor climbers at all? Maybe the company is influencing innocent people to go and kill themselves climbing sport routes and moderate trad? Maybe Clif Bar would be "better off" sponsoring golfers and bowlers. Except I don't suppose golfers and bowlers consume much of their product. After all, if people are gonna go out and kill themselves rock climbing, and eat Clif Bars to boot, where's the harm in that!. Then it became more clear to me exactly who Clif Bar is trying to protect.
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MH2
climber
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Nov 23, 2014 - 08:58am PT
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^^Conveniently found on climbers' websites?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Nov 23, 2014 - 11:09am PT
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while i agree with the first part of your sentence, i don't see the relevance, in and of itself, of the question in the second half...
The relevance is that experienced, active climbers solo all the time, not just here and there. Most any climber who is out there all the time knows as much. At least half of the descents out at Joshua Tree involve downclimbing stuff that if you pitched off of would kill you outright or leave bones showing. If you actually tracked the habits of active climbrs, you'd see this to be the case. They might not set out to intentionally free solo this or that route, but watch them on any weekend and you'll see, as Rich G. pointd out, most experts going unroped over "easy" terrain just to save time. The perception is that the harder the terrain is that is soloed, the more the true risk, regardless who is doing the soloing. This is incorrect.
JL
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