Australian Angie Scarth-Johnson to attempt 9a+ climb

Angie Scarth-Johnson hangs off the edge of a rock face, chalk-covered fingernails digging into the grooves, suspended 16 metres above crashing turquoise waves.

It’s July 2024, and the Australian is climbing a limestone cliff in Mallorca – off the east coast of Spain – without ropes or a safety harness.

As the sun shines, the 20-year-old grits her teeth, takes a breath and lunges upwards, her right hand grasping for a hold. She misses and plummets towards the ocean, tucking her arms to brace for impact.

After a few seconds, her head pops up through a bubbling pool of white foam. She looks up at the cliff, straight into the camera and grins.

“You learn how to fall,” Scarth-Johnson told this masthead. “You’re not guaranteed to be safe, it’s so much adrenaline constantly. You can’t guarantee that you’re going to hit the water and be totally fine, but you might not feel anything, or you might feel everything. It’s pretty fun.”

A form of free solo climbing, deep water soloing involves climbing over a body of water, allowing the ocean to act as a safety net.

Traditionally an outdoor climber, Scarth-Johnson broke the world record as the youngest person to lead an 8b climb – an advanced level of sports climbing – at just nine years old.

Over the next decade, the child prodigy conquered eye-watering heights, earned accolades and had her own documentary and short film. She became the first Australian woman to climb a 9a and was in contention for Olympic selection in 2020.

But in 2024, Scarth-Johnson decided to pivot to other forms of sports climbing, including bouldering and deep water soloing.

Chatting over the phone, she corrects me when I describe this period as a pause in her professional career.

“I’ve always been a professional climber, but I suppose I took around one to two years when I didn’t climb my hardest, which I was constantly trying to do for years before that,” she says.

“It’s easy to climb when you’re good at something, but when you get older, being good doesn’t really do it for you any more. You know you’re good, you’ve been good for a long time, but it’s no longer enough.

“It doesn’t fill you up the same way that it used to. You get to a point where you’re like … what else?”

The burden of being prodigy and a failed Olympics bid

On January 29, Scarth-Johnson sat down in front of her phone, brushed her long brown hair and hit record.

In an Instagram video, the 21-year-old, who has Spanish heritage – announced to her 66,000 followers that she was pursuing a long-held goal, to complete a 9a+ climb – one of the most difficult levels of professional climbing and a feat no Australian woman has achieved.

While 9a+ climbs vary they are often characterised by microscopic holds and are extremely physically demanding.

In the video, Scarth-Johnson elaborated on her decision to take time off and try different types of climbing, adding she initially felt guilty about not tackling the next big thing.

During her interview with this masthead, she says she “never fell out of love with climbing”, but a combination of burnout, the pressure of being labelled a child prodigy and the desire to experience a normal adolescence caught up to her.

She recalls going to her first party at 19, describing it as the “first time I experienced a normal teenage thing”.

“It was simply the memory of a feeling of fun without climbing, which was a foreign thing to me because I had never experienced that,” she says.

Scarth-Johnson was also dealing with the aftermath of the Tokyo Olympics, which she failed to qualify for in 2020. When the announcement came that indoor climbing would debut in Tokyo she says every single climber, whether they were outdoor or indoor, tried to qualify. 

“We weren’t sure that it was going to be selected continuously in the Olympics, so everyone was like, ‘This might be your only chance to go to the Olympics for climbing’.”

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Angie tried to qualify when she was 16, but says the pivot towards indoor training was incredibly hard, and she struggled in the new social environment. She was told by a coach that she needed to lose weight, despite “already feeling really skinny” and had trouble adapting to a new style of training.

“It was very socially pressured within our little group that we would all train together, like there would always be comments … especially during the holidays after we’d come back after Christmas, comments [around weight] would always be made.”

Looking back, Scarth-Johnson jokes she feels relieved that she didn’t qualify, but adds going to the Olympics is still a lingering thought in her mind.

“I’d never say never,” she says.

Pivoting from outdoor climbing and trying different types of climbing like deep water soloing helped her learn how to “disconnect from what it means to be constantly watched”.

In her own words, she stopped caring.

“In sport, people can be brutal, right? And you’re starting to hear these negative things that you’ve never heard before. Like you need to lose weight, like you’re never going to do that if you don’t lose weight,” she says.

“Without that pivot I don’t know if I would have continued to have a healthy relationship with climbing,” she continued.

“That’s something that I’ve seen happen to other younger prodigy climbers they lose a healthy relationship with a sport that they loved and can no longer do. ”

She made the January video for herself, but also for other young climbers out there who also might be struggling with burnout.

“That’s something that I learnt and I felt was a very valuable lesson that I had to force myself to not care [about what others thought] so much for once and take a step back,” she says.

“I guess now I’m coming back [after] two years and I feel now ready to pursue that next goal again, but with a healthier view.”

Misogyny and climbing’s #MeToo moment

In the aftermath of Hollywood’s #MeToo movement, quiet fury began to erupt on local climbing Reddit threads which eventually spilled out into the mainstream media.

The close-knit climbing fraternity, which was once considered a white, male-dominated sport, had started to diversify, urged on by the growing popularity of bouldering and indoor climbing and the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics.

With this growth came debate and calls to rename infamous climbing routes that had misogynistic meanings, references to rape and homophobic slurs as their names.

Scarth-Johnson is familiar with several of these routes, having climbed them in her childhood growing up in NSW.

“In Nowra, where I grew up climbing, these men would go and develop these routes, and sometimes when men get together … you have to remember the sport was so small, so those people named those routes because they thought it was funny, because they think it’s just them and their mates,” she says.

“That was a big conversation that happened in Australia and climbing.”

The conversation split the climbing community in half with some calling for the controversial routes to be renamed while others argued you can’t change history.

Scarth-Johnson says she sees both perspectives, adding that many of those routes were developed in a time when men weren’t held accountable.

“You can’t always beat someone up for their mistakes,” she said. “It was time to change the names, and that’s what we did.”

Climbing always felt like a male-dominated sport when Scarth-Johnson was growing up, but the 21-year-old says the sport has evolved to become more progressive and inclusive

“Like 2016 onwards … it’s a very inclusive sport, and people will say something and call you out and remove you from the sport totally if you cross a line, which is good because it means people are held accountable,” she says.

In 2026, Scarth-Johnson does not have a strict timeline of when she wants to complete the 9a+ climbing goal. She’s taking the pressure off and channelling her inner child – the resilient kid who wasn’t afraid of falling and who loved climbing.

“I feel like I have been in this industry for so long, but I’m just getting to a point where don’t really care any more, calling bullshit on everyone,” she laughs.

“I’m trying to be that younger kid that just would hear noise in the background, but wouldn’t care.”

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