Janja Garnbret matches women's climbing grade record with 9b+ ascent in France
Slovenian Olympic champion Janja Garnbret has become the second woman to scale a 9b+ route, proving the recent breakthrough in elite female sport climbing is a sustained shift rather than an isolated achievement.
Janja Garnbret has climbed Bibliographie in Céüse, France, becoming the second woman in history to complete a route graded 5.15c, also known internationally as 9b+. The Slovenian athlete achieved the ascent just 14 months after American Brooke Raboutou first broke the previous gender barrier at this extreme level of difficulty.
For nearly ten years, the 5.15b (9b) grade served as the absolute ceiling for female sport climbers worldwide. It functioned as an unofficial benchmark that the strongest athletes continually attempted but could not surpass until Raboutou sent the route Excalibur in Italy in April 2025.
The rapid succession of these two ascents signals a permanent shift in the sport's highest echelons. While Raboutou reached the grade by jumping directly to 5.15c without prior success at the 5.15 level, Garnbret brings a different pedigree to the rock face as a two-time Olympic champion and the most decorated competition climber in history.
This rapid progression at the elite level carries clear implications for the sport's growing commercial ecosystem. Garnbret’s status as an Olympic champion means her outdoor successes reach a vastly wider audience than traditional climbing media, directly benefiting the European regions that host these benchmark routes and the outdoor equipment markets that sponsor them.
In the United States, climbers utilize the Yosemite Decimal System, which categorizes the hardest sport routes from 5.15a through 5.15d. Internationally, these exact same grades are designated as 9a through 9c, providing a universal language for a highly technical discipline where every incremental step up represents a massive leap in physical difficulty.
At the 5.15c (9b+) level, the margin for error is virtually nonexistent, and the grade has historically been reached by only a tiny fraction of climbers globally. The next tier, 5.15d (9c), represents the absolute frontier of the sport, with very few proposed ascents and almost no successful repeats by anyone.
The fact that the second 5.15c ascent followed the first in little over a year suggests the previous decade-long stagnation was merely a temporary plateau. Attention within the global climbing community now turns to identifying the next athlete capable of pushing the boundaries, and whether the ultimate 9c grade is finally within reach for female competitors.
