The 2026 World Climbing Series Prague is done. Five days at Štvanice Stadium, two disciplines, two complete sets of podiums — and one athlete whose week produced the kind of result that competition climbing's compressed, high-stakes format rarely permits: a clean sweep of both disciplines in a single event.
Sorato Anraku (JPN) won both the men's boulder and the men's lead final at Prague. His fourth consecutive World Climbing Series gold of the 2026 season. No male climber in the modern WCS era has won four successive golds in a single season before.
Boulder: Earlier in the Week
Women's boulder: Annie Sanders (USA) took gold in the women's final, defeating the field including WCS season leader Erin McNeice to claim her strongest result of the week. Sanders's technical reading of the boulder problems — she consistently identified optimal sequences early in the attempt window rather than improvising under time pressure — was the differentiating factor across the final's four problems. The win extends an already strong 2026 that began with a lead victory at Wujiang.
Men's boulder: Anraku claimed gold by two-tenths of a point over Dohyun Lee (KOR) in a men's final that came down to the margins of body position across four boulders. The margin — 0.2 points — was the closest men's boulder final result of the Prague event's history. Lee has been the nearest challenger to Anraku throughout the 2026 season, and the pattern held in the Czech capital: Anraku wins by the smallest defensible distance.
Lead Finals: Today
Women's lead: Grossman closed the women's final with a top on the final move of the final route. The "last-minute top" — a phrase that sounds like competition commentary but accurately describes a climber reaching the final hold of a route in the closing seconds of the four-minute attempt — delivered the gold in the way that lead climbing's format uniquely allows: the scoreboard doesn't shift until the final clip, and then it shifts everything. Grossman's performance was patient through the route's technical mid-section and explosive at the crux above 30 metres — the precise distribution of effort that lead climbing's format rewards.
Men's lead: Anraku completed the double in a final where the lead qualification had gone differently — Indonesian climber Putra Tri Ramadani had topped the lead qualification round, narrowly ahead of Anraku, and the semi-final Saturday session had been dominated by Mejdi Schalck (FRA). The final produced a different order. Anraku won, Lee was second, Schalck third — the same three names from the boulder final, in the same positions. Their year-long rivalry has produced consistent hierarchies that suggest the competition between these three athletes will define the men's WCS standings until the season's end.
Connect with training partners, earn travel miles, and discover terrain worth crossing borders for.
Join ZealZagFollow us on InstagramThe Season Picture
Anraku's four golds in 2026 — across multiple events and now spanning both disciplines at Prague — put him in a position that the WCS standings math makes stark: the rest of the field would need to win every remaining event and see him fail to score to approach his total. Dohyun Lee, consistently second or better across the season, is the only realistic rival to his overall standing.
For women: Annie Sanders's boulder gold at Prague, paired with her lead win at Wujiang earlier in the year, puts her close to WCS leader Erin McNeice. The lead final win for Grossman adds depth to a women's field where the top seven positions are separated by fractional points.
The next stop on the World Climbing Series calendar: Innsbruck, June 15–21.
For athletes heading from Prague to the next training destinations before Innsbruck, see our Frankenjura climbing destination guide. For the opening of Prague's lead competition on June 4, see our lead qualification field report.
