The Climbing World Championships.

Status in October 2026

• Most recent edition: Seoul, South Korea, 21 to 28 September 2025.
• No championships in 2026. World Climbing says the event is held every two years.
• Next edition: summaries of the LA28 qualification documents place the 2027 World Championships in Brno, Czechia, in August 2027. We have not confirmed that on a World Climbing page.

Where it started: Frankfurt, 1991

World Climbing dates its first World Championships to 1991 in Frankfurt. Wikipedia gives the details: organised by the UIAA on 1 and 2 October 1991, in Lead and Speed, with 110 competitors from 22 nations. Wikipedia lists the first world champions as Francois Legrand (France) and Susi Good (Switzerland) in Lead, and Hans Florine (United States) and Isabelle Dorsimond (Belgium) in Speed. LaCrux says bouldering joined the World Championships in 2001. More on the early years is on the competition climbing history page.

Seoul 2025

The 2025 IFSC Climbing World Championships ran in Seoul from 21 to 28 September 2025, according to World Climbing's event page; Wikipedia names the KSPO Dome as the venue. The Lead podiums below come from World Climbing's event page. The Boulder and Speed podiums come from Wikipedia, with the confirmations noted.

AscentStats, a climbing analytics site, made two claims about Seoul that we have not been able to confirm from a second source. It says Garnbret's Boulder gold was her 10th World Championship gold medal, and that she entered only two competitions in 2025, Innsbruck and Seoul, and won both. It also says Lee Dohyun became the first climber to win medals in both Boulder and Lead at the same World Championships.

World Climbing published a headline saying Aleksandra Miroslaw, the 2025 women's Speed champion, will retire at the end of the 2026 season. We saw the headline only and did not read the article.

The para climbing world championships ran alongside in Seoul; they are on the para climbing page.

Bern 2023

The 2023 IFSC World Championships were held in Bern, Switzerland, from 1 to 12 August 2023, according to World Climbing's event page. Wikipedia names the PostFinance Arena as the venue and says the Speed and combined events were the first qualifying event for the Paris 2024 Olympics. World Climbing says the championships drew 42,000 spectators; that is the federation's own figure.

Bern had a Boulder and Lead combined event, the Olympic format of the time, as well as the single disciplines. The combined podiums come from World Climbing's event page; the single-discipline podiums come from Wikipedia, with the confirmations noted.

Olympics.com and Planetmountain both report the men's Boulder title as Mickael Mawem's first world title, won on 4 August 2023. In the men's Speed final, Olympics.com reported (as seen in a search summary) that Long Jinbao was disqualified for a false start and Zurloni won in 5.56 s on 10 August 2023.

Names in the results

Names are spelled as each source gives them. Korean names in particular appear in different orders and forms across these sources, for example Chaehyun Seo on World Climbing's 2025 page and Seo Chae-hyun in Wikipedia's 2023 table.

The same names run through every recent championship. Janja Garnbret won the women's combined in 2023 and both Boulder and Lead in 2025; Jakob Schubert won the men's Lead and combined titles in 2023; and Sorato Anraku took silver in Lead in 2023 and gold in Boulder in 2025. How they have fared in the 2026 season is on the 2026 World Climbing Series page.