Kaunas and Keqiao 2026: event tiers and the new model

The 2026 bouldering season opens on April 25 with the World Climbing Europe Series in Kaunas, Lithuania, followed on May 1 by the World Climbing Series in Keqiao, China. The names are new this year: the federation has rebranded itself World Climbing (formerly IFSC) and renamed its circuits along with it. The structure is unchanged: a development-tier event one week, a flagship-tier event the next.

Sam Avezou and Lina Funa took the wins in Kaunas. In Keqiao, Sorato Anraku won the men’s, repeating his Keqiao 2025 result, and Zélia Avezou (Sam’s sister) edged Janja Garnbret by 0.2 points to win the women’s in the first event of the World Climbing Series.

What’s new beyond the federation’s branding is on our side: this is the first season in which our Bayesian model recognises event tiers as a categorical input rather than a binary one.

Why tiers matter

Through 2025, the model assigned a single shared offset to every route that wasn’t from a “top-tier” event, and by “top-tier” the code meant “anything that isn’t a Continental Cup”. European Cups, Olympics, World Championships, and World Cups all fell into the top tier. The 2026 calendar made the artefact harder to ignore: Kaunas had a roster of mostly mid-pack national-team climbers and no athlete from the world top ten. Keqiao a week later had Anraku, Lee, Schalck, Garnbret, Bertone, Mackenzie, Sanders. Treating routes from those two events as draws from the same difficulty distribution would have inflated the standing of whoever happened to dominate the weaker field.

So this season the model carries a categorical event-tier indicator with three values, and a separate route-grade offset is estimated for each:

  • Tier 1: World Cup / World Climbing Series, World Championships, Olympics. The reference category; offset fixed at zero.
  • Tier 2: European Cup / Europe Series. Offset estimated jointly with everything else, with a weakly informative prior centred on zero.
  • Tier 3: Continental Cup and Continental Championships. Offset estimated, with a prior centred on −0.5 logits.

The tier-2 prior is deliberately neutral. We don’t bake in the hypothesis that Europe Series routes are easier; we let the data say so.

What the data says

After the 2026 fit (2025 priors, two events of new data) the posterior on the Tier-2 offset is:

  Mean (logits) 95% CI Approx. ELO
Men −1.04 [−2.14, +0.06] ≈ −125
Women −1.88 [−2.99, −0.76] ≈ −225

The model’s best estimate is that an average Europe Series route has been about 125 ELO easier than an average World Cup route for the men, and about 225 ELO easier for the women. The men’s interval brushes zero, since only one Europe Series event has entered the fit so far. The women’s is well below.

In success-probability terms, a 1.88-logit gap is roughly a 4:1 shift for a climber of fixed ability. The strongest women in Kaunas were not playing the same game as the strongest women in Keqiao.

Where it shows up in the standings

The clearest case is Jakoba Rauter, the Austrian who won the Kaunas semi-final, finished fourth in the Kaunas final, and did not compete at Keqiao. Under the new model she sits eighth in the women’s world rankings. The previous binary classifier, which treated Europe Series and World Cup routes as drawing from the same difficulty distribution, would have placed her several positions higher: her single dominant semi-final was being read as a result against World-Cup-calibre opposition rather than against a Europe Series field.

Rauter is 16. She made her senior debut at Kaunas after winning the 2024 European Youth Cup boulder title and, earlier this year, the U19 World Climbing Europe Youth Series in Soure, Portugal. Her high ranking traces back to a dominant Kaunas semi-final, where she topped the field of mostly national-team climbers. A single event is a thin signal, and the model knows it; the rest of the season will tell us much more. She is one of the more interesting climbers to watch as it unfolds.

The top of the standings is otherwise where one would expect:

Men. Anraku 3160, Lee 2988, Schalck 2908, T. Narasaki 2824, M. Bertone 2706.

Women. Garnbret 2956, Bertone 2654, Mackenzie 2600, Sanders 2581, Z. Avezou 2571.

Five of last year’s top-ten women (Garnbret, Bertone, Sanders, Z. Avezou, Sekikawa) were on the eight-climber Keqiao women’s final.

The men’s standings show a clearer top-three pattern: Anraku, Lee and Schalck are 80-plus ELO clear of the field. Tomoa Narasaki, fourth in the season standings, climbed at that level in the Keqiao final and finished 0.3 points outside the podium.

Two French sibling pairs sit in the world top ten after the opening events: Oriane Bertone (women’s #2) and Max Bertone (men’s #5); Zélia Avezou (women’s #5) and Sam Avezou (men’s #7).

A note on the women’s setting at Keqiao

The three hardest women’s top problems in the dataset (back to 2008), sorted by posterior route-grade, are all from Keqiao 2026: Semi-final boulder 1 (rating 10.58, 0/24 tops), Qualification-A boulder 5 (10.22, 0/34), and Final boulder 1 (10.08, 0/8). The previous record-holder, a 2025 Innsbruck semi-final problem, sat at 9.91.

Boulders that defeat their entire field aren’t unprecedented; they show up a few times most seasons. What pushes these three to the top of the list is the field. The Keqiao women’s final included five of last year’s top ten, and none of them topped F-T1. Every additional strong climber’s failure tightens the model’s posterior on a problem’s difficulty. The 2026 semi-final brackets also carry 24 climbers (versus the historical 20), giving the model more evidence per boulder there too.

What to watch

More Europe Series events on the schedule will tighten the Tier-2 posterior, and the men’s interval should resolve away from zero (or pin to it) as the season progresses. The next World Climbing Series stop is Bern. We’ll have an updated read on field strengths, and on whether the 2025 top order is travelling intact, after that.