Grandpa Alfons Lechner is proud of his granddaughter Anna. The 18-year-old is a climber and this year she competed with the adults for the first time. In her special discipline bouldering, i.e. climbing at jump height, she came third at the German championship in Bochum in June, at the European Cup in Krakow she won gold and at the youth world championships in Russia she reached fourth place. Because of this success, she was nominated by the national coaches for her first World Cup in Seoul, which was canceled due to the pandemic. And now Lechner also has to pass at the end of the season, the European Cup in the Portuguese Soure next weekend: The knee is causing problems. Even the little streak of bad luck at the end of the year does not change anything in grandfather’s pride, after all, his granddaughter has successfully caught up with adults.
Also because Anna Lechner has nerves like wire ropes, she was able to deliver this excellent season and at the same time finish school with an Abitur grade of 1.6. Not an easy tour, as this example shows: after successfully participating in the DM in Bochum, she drove back to Munich for hours at night and passed her oral Abi examination in biology the next day. How did she handle it mentally? “I made a plan in which I divided my time into fixed days of climbing and school,” she explains. So she didn’t look at any learning material on that climbing weekend and just concentrated on the competition. “Ultimately, you can’t do anything the night before anyway.” She then took the joyful feeling about third place with her into the test.
It went up for a long time, then came a phase of stagnation. “That’s when she learned to fight,” says the trainer
“No normal person would have done that,” says Ines Dull. The 30-year-old is a Bavarian state trainer and looks after her athletes at the state performance center in Augsburg. This “cool head” is Lechner’s great strength: “98 percent of the time she can show what she can do in competitions.” Dull feels that the subsequent nomination for the World Cup in Seoul is “overdue”, because her athlete has definitely proven that she is a candidate for a medal. Because Lechner has learned to fight: After a period of great progress, Dull often observed a phase of stagnation in her protégés, especially during puberty. “This is where it decides whether the athletes stick with it or not,” says Dull. Young women in particular start questioning their achievements early on. Anna Lechner has decided to take up sport and has made enormous progress this year. There is only physical potential, said Dull: “But it would be a shame if we already had everything.”
Anna Lechner describes herself as an “intuitive climber” who steps into the boulder and feels the rock, which may like to be “difficult to read”. In addition, everything is dynamic and coordinative, especially jumps and slabs. She calls this “New School Bouldering”, a new style of bouldering that increasingly relies on spectacular action on the wall. Her preference for this climbing style is also a reason why she is not so strong in lead climbing, i.e. climbing in lead climbing on the rope: “This just holding on is not good for me.” As a pure bouldering specialist, the 2024 Olympics in Paris could come too early for you if bouldering and lead are rated together and speed individually. 2028 in Los Angeles could have come its time, at the moment there is a discussion about evaluating all three disciplines individually: “This is more my world.”
Lechner “came to climb the classic way through her father,” who took her into the hall when she was five. He travels a lot in the mountains and wanted to pass on his passion to the children. He has also achieved this with her big sister, who also climbs competitions, but not as “performance-oriented” as Anna Lechner says. Her path led her through climbing training at the age of six to the national team. Only this year did she fully specialize in bouldering, the reason being the complicated promotion of young talent, which is why she had to train all three disciplines in the first few years.
And what happens after school? “Now I concentrate on climbing and see where I can get with a lot of training,” says Lechner. She gives herself a year for this, the university is still set: “Climbing is not yet such a big sport” in order to be able to make a living from it. Only very few people succeed in doing that. Now the World Cup debut is coming up next year, her grandfather can hardly wait.
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