Meet the fastest man in the world: No, not Noah Lyles — speed climber Sam Watson

LE BOURGET, France — The morning after American sprinter Noah Lyles was anointed the fastest man on earth, an 18-year-old chess aficionado who still lives at home with his parents stopped Lyles in the Olympic village, with a bit of a reality check for the gold medalist: “Unfortunately,” Sam Watson told Lyles, “I am the fastest man in the world.”

Imagine Lyles’ initial surprise given this particularly bold moment, and then imagine his utter shock to learn that Watson wasn’t necessarily lying.

Because Lyles can certainly stake claim to being the fastest man on earth (horizontally), but Watson can say the same about himself (vertically). The Olympics isn’t a place that lends itself to sharing glory, but this is a case of exactly that — the fastest man in the world and the other fastest man in the world. The only difference at this point is that Lyles already has the hardware while Watson, who races in the speed climbing finals on Thursday, still needs to make good on his talk.

On Tuesday, Watson wasted no time in beginning to walk the walk (or climb the climb) when, in the preliminary rounds of speed climbing, he broke the world record — the third time he had done so in three months. In front of a packed crowd in sweltering heat, he scaled the equivalent of a five-story building in 4.75 seconds — a real-life Spiderman.

Sam Watson’s world record-breaking climb got the crowd ROARING at Le Bourget Sport Climbing Venue. ⚡️ pic.twitter.com/GHKtWE7fWg

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024

Watson is the new face of international speed climbing, a wunderkind in a sport that’s growing by the day. And Watson sees that bold, brash confidence as a key to both pieces of that — his own success and the success of his sport.

“I’ve always had the idea that I want to be unique and carve my own path,” Watson said. “I think I’ve done that quite well in being someone that someone else can look up to and they can then take the idea of carving their own path after seeing me.”

Watson grew up in Southlake, Texas, and early on his parents identified him as a “vertically inclined child.” At age 5, he was finally old enough to use the climbing wall at the gym where the family went, allowing him to scratch his itch — without the threat of broken bones (or home repairs).

Climbing wasn’t an Olympic sport until the 2021 Games, and even then the competition involved three disciplines — lead climbing, bouldering and speed climbing — with scoring being an accumulation of all three. But ahead of the Paris Games, climbing was divided into two — a combined climbing event (bouldering and lead) and speed, as its own separate entity.

When the shift was made, Watson, who had always preferred the speed discipline, began to focus on just that. He made the declaration then, as a 16-year-old, that he would climb the 49-foot wall in under five seconds, a feat that had never been done in the history of the sport.

“Everything is impossible until somebody decides that it’s not,” said Ray Watson, Sam’s dad. “He just decided he was going to do it. No human being had done it — ever. And he just decided he was going to do it. … I think that that type of determination and that belief really is just kind of intrinsic in who he is.”

As a kid, he hadn’t been one of the physically stronger climbers, so while other kids used their brute force to make their way up the wall, he had to use angles and efficiencies to do the same. With that technique, he quickly made his way through the youth scene and once he went through puberty and added more muscle mass, it was a marriage of his mind and body on the climbing wall. And when he began to focus on just speed events, it all swelled at the perfect moment.

Like Watson, with other climbers opting in to focus on speed, the world records, which had previously stood for three to four years before being broken, began to shatter. Iranian Reza Alipour Shenazandifard’s 2017 record of 5.48 had stood untouched until May 2021, when it was broken twice on the same day by two different Indonesian climbers, Kiromal Katibin and Veddriq Leonardo. For the next year, Katibin and Leonardo would continue to jockey back and forth for the world-leading time. And finally, in April 2023, the until-then elusive five-second ceiling had been cracked by Leonardo.

Then, last April, at an international event in China, Watson clocked two climbs under five seconds. When he got off the wall, Watson’s coach, Albert Ok, joked with him and asked why his reaction time was so slow. For a long time, Watson had been clocking 4.6s in practice so Ok essentially wanted to know, why not break the record by more?

Ok and Watson live in the minutiae of the event, and it’s why Watson thrives.

The 15-meter wall has a standardized route with 20 hand holds and 11 foot holds — whether you climb on a wall in Germany, China or Texas, it’s the exact same. Traditionally, coaches focused on strength and repetition, believing that the better you know the wall, the faster you climb it. But Ok believes the fastest way to cut time between the floor and the timer panel (the final move that athletes must touch in order to complete the route) is to spend as little time touching the wall as possible. Whether that means omitting holds or changing angles of a foot (the biggest pre-Olympic adjustment they made was a five-degree turn of Watson’s foot on one hold), it’s all a net positive. It should come as no surprise that Ok also works as a programmer and takes a similar approach to the wall.

The vast majority of Olympic climbers do 13 moves. Watson does 12. He says he meditates while he climbs, a part of his regimented routine that ensures he can peak at this exact moment to not only continue to break his own world record but also win gold.

The hope is that his performance opens eyes — both to the traditionalists in the sport who scoff at speed climbing as a lesser version of the other disciplines as well as people who’ve never considered clipping into a belay and making that first move. Ok points to the fact that there are just seven or eight world-class speed-climbing walls in America right now. Access to the sport is limited, but if Watson can help open some eyes, they can bring more to the sport.

“For the longest time, speed (climbing) in America was a laughing stock,” Ok said. “But it’s because of his ability and showing that the sport has value and that it’s exciting and that it’s something people should respect — the will to change the sport drastically over the next, even, couple of months.”

With a gold medal climb on Thursday, Watson would be one step closer to that … and one step closer to backing up his claim about being the fastest man in the world. And with that evidence, he just might take it back to Lyles.

“Obviously, Noah is an incredible athlete,” Watson said. “But, I’m faster.”

(Top photo of Sam Watson celebrating his world-record climb: Al Bello / Getty Images)