Discussion: Sport grades in Sweden

Sport grades in Sweden

I am used to seeing French grades being used for sport routes. In guide books (Göteborg, Stockholm, Mälardalen) and gyms. French grades is what's most intuitive for me to understand the overall difficulty in an area.

thecrag currently does not expect French grades for sport routes in Sweden (in SWE grade context) which means routes with French grades will look like for example FR:6a or {FR} 6a instead of just 6a, and grade summaries at the top of each area will show Swedish grades even if the area has only sport routes.

I suggest there be a change in the system for SWE grade context so that French grades are "assumed" for sport routes. For that I created this Github issue, https://github.com/theCrag/website/issues/4230.

But of course everyone's opinion should be heard. Please share your thoughts here if you are also climbing in Sweden.

The admins understandably don't want to make a system change and later find out it's not what the commuity wants.

Mattias

I agree: Most people I climb with here in Sweden are not even familiar with the Swedish grading system and use the French one as their standard reference. So to them (and me), inspecting the difficulty band of a crag with Swedish grades in not as intuitive as using one with the French system.

It may seem kind of strange to use the French grading system as the standard in Sweden when there is a Swedish one. But conventions can change, and just as Sport climbing has superseded Trad climbing as the standard climbing style, French grades now are much more commonly used.

Just to be clear: Changing the grade context for Sweden from Swedish to French would entail that (besides the changes Mattias Josefsson pointed out) the difficulty band for all areas and crags in Sweden would change from showing the Swedish grades to the French ones.

From:

Sweden - image-1698839649252.png

To:

Sweden - image-1698839934451.png

The grade of each individual route, however, will not change: A Swedish 7+ will still be that same grade, but it will be depicted as SWE 7+.

So I am in favor of changing this, but am open to hear other opinions.

In my experience french grades are always used for sport routes, but swedish is still the standard for trad.

As long as trad areas are still default to swedish i see no problem with changing sport default to french.

But that's exactly the point (and I mentioned that above): With the changes proposed, the grade context for every crag in Sweden would be French. And how would you distinguish between Sport crags and Trad crags? Kullaberg is a crag with predominantly Trad climbing but some cliffs (like Trollhättemal) offer mostly Sport.

Once again: Route grades won't change, but the difficulty band will change, and the depiction of route grades will look slightly different.

For this to make sense you'd want more sport routes than trad routes in Sweden. This is not the case (yet), there are still more trad routes with the SWE grade context than sport routes.

I'm not sure if the total amount of routes would be an appropriate measure for the popularity of a grading system in a given population. In my opinion, the question is which system most people can read intuitively.

Good point. Amount of tics might be a better metric? My point is that historically trad routes and the swedish grade system has been the norm and the most intuitive system. I'd agree that the "new wave" of climbers would absolutely be more accustomed to the french grades, as am I. And I don't think the "old guard" will care about grading on this webpage.

Yeah, I agree.

We know what is a sport route and what is a trade route. So we could have a rule that sport routes use French and trad uses swedish grades.

Interesting! How would that be depicted in a crag where there is both Sport and Trad routes (like Gubbamalen)? (Currently, since Swedish is the grade context, grades for Trad route are shown as 7+ while grades for Sport routes are shown as {FR} 6c+ or FR 6c+.)

And which grade context would the difficulty band be in then?

There is a difference between Swedish context and swedish grade.

Swedish context tells us how to interpret grades where there could be ambiguity based on the gear style.

So typing in a 4 for a trad route would be interpreted as a swedish grade and as a sport route would be interpreted as a french grade.

Think of a context is a set of rules that can sort out ambiguity.

To be clear, my suggestion was not to change the grade context for Sweden to French. I think it makes sense to have the Swedish grade context in Sweden since we have the Swedish grading scale. I have understood that the Swedish grades were traditionally used for both trad and sport climbing, and still are in some areas like Bohuslän, at least still in the Bohuslän guide book. In my experience Swedish grades are standard for trad climbing and that is completely fine by me.

My suggestion was too keep the Swedish grade context but modify it to use French grades for sport routes, like Simon Dale wrote. (It was actually his idea after I started requesting a whole bunch of sport crags around Göteborg to be changed to French context.)

Regarding grade summaries, I'd expect them to use the grade system for the most common gear style of each area. SWE if the most common gear style is trad, FR if the most common is sport and FB if the most common is boulder. I guess that's the logic being used already now (correct me if I'm wrong Simon Dale). For example, see the area Kåhög which has all three gear styles and the most common is boulder at 45% so the grade summary uses FB, because the Swedish grade context is configured to use FB for boulders.

Oh, then I understood this wrong, I'm sorry for the confusion!

Hey, trying to revive this discussion.

The change I suggest is for sport grades in Sweden to be interpreted as French grades. No change is suggested for trad routes.

# Implications (or what I imagine to happen)

1. Grade bands use grading of the most frequent style in that area. SWE for trad, FR for sport, FB for bouldering.

2. A sport route with grade 6a would be depicted as just 6a (not FR:6a or {FR} 6a as is the case now).

3. A trad route with grade 7+ would be depicted as just 7+.

4. A sport route with grade 5+ would be depicted as just 5+ (this is a French grade).

5. A trad route with grade 5+ would be depicted as just 5+ (this is a Swedish grade).

# One note

There might be some ambiguity if sport grades are written as 5+, 5, 5-, 4+ etc. because those can also be Swedish grades. But I think that is probably not a big issue because 1) I think most users will expect a French grade for sport and 2) the two scales align pretty closely in that range. This could also be avoided easily by always using letters in French grades (5c, 5b, 5a, 4c etc).

I agree with the above conclusion, if there is a way to separate default grading systems for trad and sport. Maybe this is not something doable currently for theCrag? But we are able to customize which grading systems areas default to once we are logged in.

I agree!

I agree