With a lot of individual Olympic sports, you train with your teammates, you live with your teammates, and then you compete against your teammates. That’s true in plenty of sports. In some of the smaller sports, too, you train with all of the best in the world, no matter the country they’re from, and then you compete against them. It’s friends versus friends. Brooke Raboutou is a silver medal winning Olympic climber after the Paris Olympics, which means she competed against and beat plenty of her friends. She discussed the mentality around this while talking to Alex Honnold in his podcast Climbing Gold.
“Training and competing alongside your closest friends is no easy feat. Ego, jealousy, disappointment, pride and other volatile emotions are constantly at play, and everything is taken to a new level when you have to compete AGAINST those same people. Brooke Raboutou has navigated this reality for years. Alex Honnold talks with Brooke about how she manages these dynamics and stressors in this clip from the Climbing Gold Podcast.“
The full podcast is available both on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts if you want to listen. It was filmed before the Olympics, but Raboutou was still a world class competitive climber before the Olympics, and she has plenty of interesting insights to share about her life as a climber.