Adam Ondra

“I was born into a climbing family.”

“I felt the strongest impulse to climb when I entered my first competitions.”

“The harder routes you climb, the more interesting the climbing gets and the more crazy moves you are forced to figure out.”

“I started climbing thanks to my parents, who have been going with me on the rocks since I was a baby.”

“The Dawn Wall is so obviously the hardest big-wall climb in the world, so that was the challenge.”

“When I was young, I loved the feeling of escaping to the rocks on a Friday afternoon with my parents.”

“I finished my degree so I'm definitely hoping I have some more time to climb.”

“For meat, I eat mostly high-quality fish and chicken.”

“My diet is mostly composed of whole-grain cereals, legumes, beans, lentils. Lots of cooked, baked, or steamed vegetables. Lots of spices like curcumin or cumin that help aid digestion. Some superfoods.”

“What really motivates me to climb harder and harder is not necessarily that I want to push my limits or show who's best, but climbing harder and harder routes makes it more fun.”

“Czech people are quite hard to get to know, in my opinion.”

“I do not climb really dangerous stuff.”

“I thought I knew how to jug, but when you only jug 30 meters to the top of a sport climb, you don't need good technique. But jugging 400 meters, that's a big deal.”

“If I'm climbing really slow, I kind of feel like, 'Hmm, this is weird.' Like a fish without water.”

“Bouldering on real rock, which I'm more used to climbing on, is a lot more static and requires mostly finger power, whereas competition-style boulder problems are about coordination.”

“Climbing in a beautiful location, the goal is not to power my way up but to become for that moment a part of the landscape, part of the rock.”

“I think in general the American scene is much more focused on bouldering, where in Europe they're more focused on sport climbing.”

“It's really difficult to climb effortlessly.”

“I don't really think about why I climb, I just simply love it.”

“For the Olympics, I'm mostly training in the gym, so I'm running laps on the standard speed wall.”