Janja Garnbret

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• Top 6 Rock Climbers of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Alex Honnold

  Alex Honnold's 2017 free solo ascent of El Capitan's 3,000-foot vertical face in Yosemite, climbing entirely without ropes or safety equipment, is widely regarded as one of the greatest athletic achievements in human history, and the 2018 documentary Free Solo chronicling the climb won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His achievement required years of meticulous preparation, including memorizing every individual hand and foot placement across the route's thousands of feet, since a single mistake at nearly any point on the climb would have been fatal. Honnold's calm, methodical public demeanor when discussing the extreme risk of free soloing, including his own analytical explanations of how he manages fear during climbs, made him a subject of significant scientific interest, including brain imaging studies examining his neurological response to risk compared to typical subjects. His combination of an unprecedented, singular athletic achievement and the widely seen documentary chronicling it has made Honnold the individual most globally recognized rock climber in the sport's history, introducing free solo climbing to audiences far beyond the sport's traditional community.

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• Adam Ondra

  Adam Ondra became the first person to climb a route graded 9c, the sport's hardest confirmed difficulty rating, completing "Silence" in a Norwegian cave in 2017 after years of dedicated attempts, a technical achievement widely regarded as the most difficult single rock climb ever completed. His combination of exceptional physical strength, flexibility, and mental endurance has made Ondra the dominant competitive sport climber of his generation, and he's set numerous first ascents of the world's hardest rated routes across multiple countries throughout his career. Ondra's willingness to spend years working a single extremely difficult route, sometimes attempting the same climb dozens or hundreds of times before succeeding, reflected a level of dedicated persistence uncommon even among elite climbers pursuing the sport's outer technical limits. His combination of setting the sport's hardest confirmed grade and his sustained dominance across both competition and outdoor climbing has made Ondra the climber most widely regarded as the greatest sport climber currently competing, and arguably in the discipline's history.

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• Chris Sharma

  Chris Sharma became one of the most influential figures in pushing sport climbing's technical difficulty standards forward during the late 1990s and 2000s, completing several of the world's hardest routes at the time and helping establish climbing destinations in Spain as globally significant centers for elite sport climbing. His charismatic public persona and his role in several widely viewed climbing films helped introduce sport climbing to a broader mainstream audience during a period when the sport had limited visibility outside its dedicated community. Sharma's combination of raw physical power and creative problem-solving on extremely technical routes made him one of the most influential stylistic models for subsequent generations of competitive and outdoor sport climbers. His combination of genuine technical climbing achievements at the sport's cutting edge and his significant role popularizing climbing to mainstream audiences has made Sharma one of the most historically influential figures in the sport's growth from a niche activity into a broader recognized athletic discipline.

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• Lynn Hill

  Lynn Hill became the first person, male or female, to complete a free ascent of El Capitan's famous route "The Nose" in Yosemite, in 1993, a milestone climb that remained unrepeated by any other climber for years afterward given its extraordinary technical difficulty. Her subsequent 1994 return to complete the same climb in under 24 hours, a feat that had seemed nearly impossible even to experienced climbers, further cemented her achievement as one of the most significant single climbs in the sport's history. Hill's dominance in competitive sport climbing throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning numerous major international competitions, established her as the leading woman in the sport during that era, before her attention shifted toward the more historically significant outdoor free-climbing achievements that defined her broader legacy. Her combination of the historic first free ascent of The Nose and her competitive dominance has made Hill one of the most significant figures in rock climbing history, and her famous quote that the climb was "free, historic, and impossible for a man" reflected the specific technical body-proportion advantages she brought to that particular achievement.

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• Tommy Caldwell

  Tommy Caldwell completed the first free ascent of El Capitan's Dawn Wall, widely considered the most difficult big-wall rock climb in the world, in a grueling 19-day effort in 2015 alongside climbing partner Kevin Jorgeson, an achievement that drew significant mainstream media coverage well beyond the climbing community. His accomplishment came after seven years of dedicated preparation and repeated attempts on the extraordinarily technical route, reflecting a level of sustained, multi-year commitment to a single climbing objective that few athletes in any sport have matched. Caldwell's personal story includes losing part of a finger in a woodworking accident years before the Dawn Wall climb, an injury he adapted around rather than let end his elite climbing career, adding to the broader narrative of persistence surrounding his achievements. His combination of the historic Dawn Wall first free ascent and his broader body of significant big-wall climbing achievements has made Caldwell one of the most respected and accomplished big-wall climbers in the sport's history.

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More in Sports

• Robert Killian

  Robert Killian, a former U.S. Army Green Beret with more than 12 years of active service, won the Spartan Race World Championship in 2015 despite having just four races of OCR experience at the time, then won it again in 2019 for two career Spartan World titles. His path to obstacle racing ran through elite military and endurance competition rather than combat sports: he was a high school track star and collegiate runner who won the military division of the Ironman World Championship in Kona in 2009, was named Army Athlete of the Year in 2010, and won the grueling 68-hour Best Ranger Competition in 2016. At World's Toughest Mudder, Killian won the event three times and placed second overall (and first American) at the 2017 edition, completing 105 miles in 24 hours, one of the highest single-event distance totals recorded in the format's history. His combination of two Spartan World Championships and his background as a Best Ranger Competition champion and military Ironman world champion has made Killian one of the most distinctively credentialed competitors in obstacle course racing's history.

• Lindsay Webster

  Lindsay Webster won her first Spartan Race World Championship in 2017, then added titles in 2018, 2021, and 2022 — the 2022 win making her the first-ever four-time Spartan World Champion, male or female, at the time she achieved it. Along the way she set the sport's record for most consecutive Spartan wins with 17 in a row, and her 2021 title came alongside partner Ryan Atkins, who won the men's championship the same year in Abu Dhabi. Her combination of strong trail running speed and reliable execution on OCR's more technically demanding upper-body obstacles gave her a genuinely complete competitive profile that sustained her dominance across changing eras of the sport's growth. Her combination of a record four Spartan World Championships and her 17-race consecutive win streak has made Webster, by most accounts, the most decorated woman in obstacle course racing history.

• Hunter McIntyre

  Hunter McIntyre is a six-time obstacle course racing world champion by his own team's count, having first entered the sport almost by accident — he and a group of friends had loosely talked about doing a Spartan Race together, and he ended up the only one who actually finished it. He went on to become a three-time Hyrox World Champion as well, extending his competitive dominance into that separate hybrid fitness-racing discipline and becoming one of the few athletes to hold major titles in both OCR and Hyrox simultaneously. His path to elite athletic performance ran through bodybuilding and strength training before OCR, giving him a physical profile built for heavy carrying and climbing obstacles that distinguished him from more purely running-focused competitors, and his outspoken public persona helped introduce the sport to broader fitness audiences. His combination of six OCR world championships and his separate three-time Hyrox World Championship has made McIntyre one of the most recognizable and commercially significant figures across obstacle and hybrid fitness racing.

• Amelia Boone

  Amelia Boone, nicknamed "the Queen of Pain," won World's Toughest Mudder three times — in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — with her 2014 title coming just eight weeks after major knee surgery, a comeback timeline that became one of the defining stories of her career. She competed at an elite level while working full-time as a practicing corporate attorney, a combination that gave obstacle course racing a distinctive public profile well beyond its core competitive community during her prime. After shifting focus toward ultrarunning in 2016, Boone suffered a femoral stress fracture that put her on crutches for three months, then a cascading series of additional injuries — a sacral stress fracture, a fully displaced second metatarsal, and three separate heel stress fractures — totaling six bone stress injuries across three years. Her combination of three World's Toughest Mudder titles, including one won eight weeks post-surgery, and her later public account of recovering from six separate bone stress injuries has made Boone one of the most significant and candidly documented figures in obstacle racing's history.

• Ryan Atkins

  Ryan Atkins won the 2016 OCR World Championship in the 3km distance and later took the 2023 OCR World Championship Male 15K title, a span of major championships nearly a decade apart that reflects an unusually long competitive prime for the sport. He won the 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside partner Lindsay Webster, giving the Guelph, Ontario-based couple simultaneous titles in the same event and making them one of OCR's most publicly recognized competitive pairings before Webster went on to become the sport's most decorated woman. His background as a competitive adventure racer before focusing on obstacle course racing gave him a multi-discipline endurance foundation, and the OCR World Championships specifically returned to his home region of Collingwood, Ontario during his competitive prime, reflecting the sport's continued growth in the areas where its top athletes trained. His combination of OCR World Championships seven years apart and his 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside Lindsay Webster has made Atkins one of the most historically significant men's competitors in the sport.