Tomorrow morning, four speed climbing walls will rise on Krakow's Market Square, one of the grandest medieval public spaces in Europe and a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1978. By Saturday evening, the fastest human climbers alive will have raced up 15-metre walls, one hundred and twenty-two times, in four lanes simultaneously, in front of an audience that can watch from the terraces of the surrounding Gothic and Renaissance townhouses.
The World Climbing Series Krakow marks the first use of the "Speed 4" format on the main World Cup circuit. Instead of the standard duel — two climbers, two walls, side-by-side — the Speed 4 puts four athletes on four identical walls at once. The race clock stops for each individual at their own finish pad. The format rewards raw speed without the elimination structure of bracket racing: every run counts immediately toward progression and seeding, removing the tactical option of coasting in the early rounds. You go as fast as you physically can, every single time.
The Race for 4.58 Seconds
Speed climbing measures itself in fractions. The current men's world record — 4.58 seconds — belongs to China's Zhao Yicheng, who set it in April 2026 at the Asian Beach Games in Sanya. That mark, confirmed by World Climbing, moved the record below the once-unimaginable 4.60 barrier. Zhao is 19 years old.
The previous record holder, American Sam Watson, ran 4.74 seconds at the Paris 2024 Olympics — a world record at the time, in the bronze medal match — and knows the number well. Watson arrived in Krakow as one of the most scrutinised athletes in a sport where scrutiny is measured in hundredths of a second. At 20, he is in the middle of a rivalry with a Chinese contemporary who shares neither his nationality nor his technique but who can apparently climb that wall just as fast.
Veddriq Leonardo of Indonesia won Olympic gold in Paris when Watson broke the record in the bronze final. Leonardo remains one of the most technically precise speed climbers in the world, with footwork on the IFSC-standard 15-metre wall that climbing analysts describe as near-optimal. He has won multiple World Cup events in the post-Paris period and arrives in Krakow with a point to make: that the distance between himself and Zhao's 4.58 is smaller than it appears on paper.
China's Long Jianguo heads the 2026 season rankings. He won the world title and both gold medals at the 2025 World Games in Chengdu — the first time the Speed 4 format was used at a major international event. Long's dominance at Chengdu is part of why the IFSC carried the format into the World Cup circuit. If he wins in Krakow the argument that China has built a structural advantage in speed climbing will be hard to dismiss.
Why Krakow?
The choice of venue is not purely symbolic. World Climbing's strategic direction in recent years has been to take the sport to public spaces — to place competition walls where non-climbing audiences encounter them accidentally, walking past on a Wednesday afternoon and finding themselves watching someone sprint up a vertical surface. The effort has parallels with beach volleyball's trajectory in the 1990s: a specialist discipline that gained mainstream recognition partly through the spectacle of its unusual settings.
Krakow's Rynek Główny is one of the best public spaces in Europe for exactly this purpose. The square covers 200 metres on each side — larger than St. Peter's Square in Rome — and is surrounded on all sides by functioning city: bars, restaurants, the historic Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), the Church of Saint Mary, and tens of thousands of residents and tourists who use the space daily. Free admission means no barrier between the event and the city.
The event also benefits from Polish climbing's domestic momentum. Poland has produced competitive sport climbers for two decades — the country placed athletes at the 2024 Olympics across multiple disciplines — and the Krakow public has enough familiarity with the sport to appreciate what it is watching.
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Join ZealZagFollow us on InstagramThe Speed 4 Format: How It Works
In the standard World Cup format, Speed climbing runs as a bracket: 40 or so athletes seed themselves in qualification, the field is cut, and a bracket of 16 or 32 runs head-to-head pairs until a final. Losers are eliminated. The problem, coaches and commentators have noted, is that the bracket introduces chess: a climber leading a match knows they need to finish, not to run a personal best.
In Speed 4, there are no brackets. Qualification runs are still used to set seedings. From there, athletes progress through rounds where four climbers race simultaneously on four walls. The only question is: how fast did each person go? There is no elimination from a single error; a false start or a slip removes one competitor from a lane but the other three continue. The pressure is not to beat the person next to you — it is to be as fast as you physically can be on this particular run, on this particular wall, in Krakow, today.
The format was designed partly to allow four world-record attempts in every single race. If four of the world's fastest speed climbers are in a lane together and each runs a personal best, you get four potential world records in the same ninety-second sequence. In Chengdu in 2025, this happened twice.
What to Watch
Tomorrow (Friday, July 3): Qualification. The field of 122 runs the standard single-elimination seeding rounds through the morning. By evening, the start list for Saturday's Speed 4 rounds will be confirmed.
Saturday, July 4: Speed 4 rounds through the day, finals in the evening under lights. The Market Square lights after dark and the architecture of the Cloth Hall behind the walls makes the finals session one of the more visually arresting events on the World Climbing calendar.
Sunday, July 5: Parallel events and secondary categories.
The live stream is free on the World Climbing YouTube channel (worldclimbing.com for links; geographic restrictions apply in some markets).
For a guide to climbing the Jurassic limestone crags outside Krakow and the granite routes of the Tatry — the natural terrain that underpins Poland's climbing culture — see our Climbing Southern Poland: Jura and Tatry Route Guide.