Girl
Power. Interview of Giulia Giammarco.
She
is 29 years old, from Turin. The classical good girl, quiet and
kind. When you look at her you would never believe that she has
been the Italian Bouldering Champion for a few years now, and also
the best Italian athlete in the international bouldering competitions.
She works as an architect, and in her free time she is a sport climber.
She is the typical example of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hide. That
means that during the competitions this cute girl becomes a totally
different person, due to the explosive movements of modern bouldering,
that allow her to be a powerful and effective woman also in the
sport. When you look at her you get a very particular impression.
Her style is singular, may be unique in its kind. Her athletic gesture
is always sweet, never forced because natural and always spontaneous.
It is beautiful to see her in action. Everything seems easy, also
the hardest things. There is no apparent effort in her progression,
and also when she doesn’t succeed, she does it with class.
Giulia transmits security and positivism to the people around her.
Girl power, as we said. Soft power, with a certain style.
Let’s discover the new protagonist of national climbing through
the questions of our reporter, Letizia Gentile. The following portrait
is curious and peculiar.
Oscar Durbiano
Giulia Giammarco
I enter an architectural office, on the ground floor of an internal
yard, in the San Salvario district of Turin. I am looking for
Giulia, to interview her, and I see her in the half shadow, working
on a project.
She looks at me and I understand that I have to wait, she will
come as soon as she can. Ok, I’ll wait. I look around: big
tables, computers, designs, plastic and paperboard models, architecture
magazines. Giulia is an architect who climbs. I wonder if there
is some strange connection between the designs she makes and the
lines she follows on the rock. At the end they are both creative
itineraries that take form.
When did you start?
I started with my brother (Luca Giammarco, owner with Marzio Nardi
of the climbing gym Bside in Turin) in 1992. Of the first nine
years I remember mostly people and dear friends, more than climbing.
I wasn’t yet passionate, I didn’t climb regularly
and dedicated, I was ready to stop everything to go skiing or
to go to the seaside. The last three years have been the most
intense, rich of emotions and experiences, rigorously committed
to climbing during the summer and to spending the winter under
the boulders, also with temperatures below zero.
You are an architect who climbs for passion,
this isn’t typical for an athlete at the international top.
I
like to experience climbing as a counterpart of something else.
I have reached a good compromise with my job, training in the
evening after eight o’clock, and climbing outside only at
the weekends and in the holidays. Few very precious hours, when
I can satisfy the accumulated lust of climbing. I climb for the
sake of it, without too many expectations and without the stress
of the results, but simply to let off steam. May be this mental
attitude helps me to climb without pressure and to have some result.
How did you start competing?
I
always competed in a disordered way, without programs and without
big aspirations. I started in 1996, with some difficulty competitions,
occasional participations, mostly pressured by my brother. After
not too bad results in this specialty, I found instead better
possibilities in the bouldering competitions. A few national experiences,
than an international Master in Gap in 2000, where I placed sixth.
In 2002, by now 28 years old, I decided that I couldn’t
wait longer, if I wanted to have the opportunity to compete against
the strongest athletes of the world and, for the first time, I
planned a winter of training, with the target of participating
to a whole competition season.
The competition world is an interesting
microcosm. How do you see it?
I am fascinated by international competitions: the personalities,
the looks, the adrenalin, the tension. You breathe a strange air,
of challenge but at the same time of complicity, because you share
the same efforts and the same passion.
What is for you competition?
It is the will to compare yourself to the others and to yourself;
in the moment you decide to do it, you are able to give your best.
It is an opportunity to become aware of your limits and stop to
observe the other climbers in order to improve. It is a moment
of personal growth that can contribute to a more general development,
in climbing and in life.
Who do you admire most among the top athletes
of the women’s field?
I appreciate the constancy, determination and sportsmanship of
Levet, who smiles the few times she loses. I admire Olga Bibik,
who participates to the series with little happiness, and nevertheless
wins, far away from her little child, left in Siberia. I like
the harmony and the climate of true friendship of the Russian
team.
What are you lacking, to match them?
I should overcome some limits: more method in the preparation
of the competitive season, constancy for the shape and the results,
luck and … a few centimeters taller!
How do you train?
First of all I set some goals to find the maximum motivation:
an important competition or a trip to Fontainebleau, for example.
Then I plan, with the help of my brother, a training schedule
for two or three evenings a week. For two years I have been working
only on power and, specifically, on all my weak points: big muscles,
dynamic moves and lounges. And then I dedicate a lot of time to
bouldering on plastic and on rock, to improve my technique, the
gesture, and to assimilate always-new movements and balances.
But, above all, I try to have fun.
Let’s quantify, to discredit the idea
that the “weak gender” has only technique.
In the periods of loading I dedicate about two hours a week to
dry training on the board, one arm hangs on small edges, pyramidal
and sinusoidal series with load, campus board and weights (chest,
triceps and shoulders).
For about eight hours a week I boulder on the wall, rehearsing
the moves and making bouldering circuits to improve endurance.
I don’t quantify because the numbers are rather ridiculous.
By now you are well known as boulderer….
Yes, but think that the first time they took me bouldering I didn’t
like it at all. Two years later I tried again and I discovered
that I wasn’t so bad at it. So I have started to go more
and more often, and to love it. Later, because of the competitions
and the little time available, I felt the need to specialize,
to try to reach better results, both on the rocks and in the competitions.
Therefore for three years now I have been only bouldering, and
I have so strongly assimilated its gesture and the way to manage
the effort, that I feel very uncomfortable, physically and mentally,
to climb for more than 5 meters.
And the crags?
Something that I admire in many climbers is the polyvalence and
the will to explore and appreciate the thousand faces of climbing,
from bouldering to cragging, to the long routes in the mountains.
In this moment unfortunately, I am anything else but polyvalent.
Surely, among my future projects, there is the one of going back
and appreciate again climbing a thirty-meter route, with the fear
of falling.
What is fear for Giulia?
It’s everything I can’t control, a situation where
I don’t know the consequences.
Giulia and the control.
Everything starts from my way of being. I like living things in
a relaxed way, to fully appreciate them, and I like to master
the situations to avoid discomfort, insecurity and fear. From
outside I seem impassible, rigorous, perfectionist. In the reality
I am not self-confident and I try to overcome this insecurity
through control. I avoid situations where I don’t know variables
and consequences, because I am afraid of taking the risks, of
making mistakes. Therefore, for example, I avoid to participate
to a competition if I don’t feel prepared, I don’t
lead if I fear that I could fall, I don’t begin a project,
if I am not sure to be able to manage it in the right way. And
sometimes I lose some opportunities.
Also outside you always try to maintain
a certain control.
It always belongs to my “defense techniques”: not
to let transpire my insecurity, also if I don’t always manage
it. For example last summer, during the Coppa Italia in Bardonecchia,
I was very angry with myself because while climbing I made a lot
of faces due to the effort, while usually during the competition
I keep an impassible expression.
Let’s go back to bouldering. Two words
about ethic.
Bouldering
is such an essential activity that few apparently insignificant
factors are enough to reduce an athletic performance. In the competitions,
of course, it is difficult to break the rules. Outside instead
this is much easier. To touch the crash pad with the foot, trying
to stop an extreme flag, to be slightly pushed by a too protective
spotter, to avoid the final mantle of the problem, that “is
easy anyway”, can look like details, in reality are “discounts”
that take value away from what we are doing.
Now that bouldering is still a growing discipline it would be
important to define in a more precise way the rules of the game,
to give more credibility also to the performances on rock. I think
that ethic is an ensemble of behavioral rules, to live as honesty
act to the others and to us.
Bouldering and grades.
The grade, that nobody allegedly looks for, but everybody is fast
to communicate to the web sites and specialized magazines, is
the second crucial point of this discipline. I am the first one
to choose a problem also for its grade. At the end it is an instrument
to measure your own limits and to compare yourself to all the
other climbers in the world. It shouldn’t be the only element
though, particularly because it comes from subjective analysis.
The place, the number of repetitions, who has repeated it, in
how much time, with how many sacrifices, in which conditions,
are aspects that enrich the history of a problem and give other
parameters of evaluation.
I think that the history of bouldering, that is being written
in these last years, shouldn’t be bound only to the numbers,
because in this way it risk to be deprived and soon forgotten.
What have in common Giulia the woman, the
architect, the athlete?
Surely qualities and defects. The inability to manage situations
where I don’t have total control, that prevents me from
risking and that may be lets me lose important opportunities.
And the passion, creativity, dedication and dreams to realize.
Climbing for Giulia.
It is a complex sport, made of many details hidden behind simple
movements. Coordination, sensitivity, balance, precision, intuition,
constancy, friendship, determination, imagination, emotion, passion.
These are all aspects that exist at the same time, even in the
most essential gestures. I am searching for their right combination,
that is different every time, and lets me experience climbing
as something always new. It is a search that keeps you alive,
because it lets you dream: to climb the hardest problems and the
perfect lines, or the highest step of the podium in a World Cup.
Letizia Gentile
Who is Giulia Giammarco
29
years old, Turin
Height: 160 cm
Weight: 47 kg
Profession: architect, associate of Studioata, a group of 11 professionals
Results on rock:
7c on sight in the crag
7c bouldering
Best competition results:
1° Italian Championship 2000, 2001, 2002
1° Coppa Italia 2002
4° World Cup, Lecco 2002
2° World Cup, Argentiere 2003
2° boulder contest in Arco 2001, 2002
4° master of Argentiere 2002
Worst result:
19° World Cup, Fiera di Primiero 2003
Emotion of the year: the ascent of Sale Gosse, 7c, in Fontainebleau
after four hours of trying
Projects: to climb C'etait demain, the first 8a of Fontainebleau,
and La Boule, 8a, in Cresciano
Sponsor: La Sportiva, E9, Petzl, Bside, BSideFactory.
