Past the Crux? Exploring the Growth of Climbing in England.
Using (some) econometrics to understand the growth in climbing in England.
The Data
According to Sport England figures, participation in climbing and bouldering more than doubled in England between 2021 and 2023. More precisely, the number of participants in 2023 was 210% the number of participants in 2021.
Note for a moment what comes to mind when you see these figures:
climbing is becoming trendy - it must be the Olympic Effect;
climbing is going to become the next Crossfit;
climbing is going to loose its niche dirtbag culture;
oh my god, let’s open a climbing gym asap!
What questions might you want to ask about these figures?
What is driving this huge growth?
How is this growth in participation distributed across the country?
Are the “new” climbers mostly boulderers or rope climbers? Are they men or women?
Whilst these are all valid questions and thoughts, you will soon see that there is an even more protruding observation that these figures miss and which will completely alter your perception of these statistics.
In this article, I want to demonstrate why it is important to be critical of statistics that we read in the news, and think more laterally about how statistical headlines may have been manipulated to draw our attention.
The bigger picture
The line graph below shows the evolution of participation in climbing and bouldering according to figures from Sport England.¹ On this chart I have added markers indicating the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as well as the period during which Covid restrictions were in place in the England.
Between 2016 and 2019, we see growth in participation from 262,100 climbers to 337,300, an increase of 75,200, or 29%. From 2021 to 2023 we see the enormous growth in participation described above. Taken in isolation, these figures seem pretty good for the industry.²
Now let’s look at the Covid years - 2019 to 2021. Clearly, there is a huge drop in participation during these years, most likely due to the strict entry restrictions that gyms had to implement in this period. We see participation fall from 337,300 to 174,800, a drop of 48%. I’m sure you can already see where I’m going with this.
From a base of 174,800 participants in 2021, climbing participation did indeed increase by around 200,000 to 2023, but this doesn’t tell us much about the long term growth in popularity of the sport. In reality, there were only around 30,000 more climbers in 2023 compared to 2019, an increase of just 9%. Over the same period, Hill and Mountain Walking saw growth of 20%, whilst Parkour saw 17% growth and Fell Running a 34% increase in participation.
Think like an Economist
Economists like to think about what would have happened in a counterfactual scenario. In other words, where would climbing be now if it hadn’t been for Covid. To not over-complicate things, I have carried out a simple linear forecast, estimating participation in climbing in 2023 had the same trend between 2016 to 2019 continued between 2019 and 2023.
This estimate yields a 2023 participation of 439,886 - an additional 71,000 climbers. Had this happened, the growth rate between 2019 and 2023 would have been 30%, rather than the 9% previously noted.
More advanced techniques, such as regression analysis, can also be used to estimate what may have happened in the absence of Covid. The equation below represents a model that takes into account the impact of Covid, as well as the growth rates of Covid before and after the pandemic. This model yields a similar result to the simple forecast. Scary maths time…
This equation essentially says that participation at a given time is dependent on a baseline level of participation before covid (β₀), a baseline trend (or slope) before Covid (β₁), the change in participation resulting from Covid (β₂) and any change in the slope following Covid (β₃). ε₁ captures any error in the model.
Other methods include finding another sport that has similar characteristics to climbing along the factors that affect participation (e.g. demographics of participants), but that wasn’t affected by Covid, and comparing how participation for this sport changed over the same time period.³
The Olympic Effect?
It is difficult to clearly see any “Olympic Effect” following the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which was actually held in 2021) due to the simultaneous effect of Covid. It is possible that it is one of the drivers of the return to climbing gyms from 2021 to 2023, but it’s difficult to know for sure. Given what you’ve learned above, have a think about how you might estimate the impact of the 2024 Paris Olympics on Climbing participation once the data becomes available over the next few years.
Conclusion
I hope that from this article you have understood the importance of questioning the statistics you hear in the news; they are often presented in a way to drive an emotional reaction. When quoted in percentages, think about what the figures mean in absolute values, and vice versa. Think about the bigger picture, a longer time frame, and other factors that may be driving certain trends.
We have also touched upon some econometric analysis (my personal favourite part of economics). Don’t worry if you haven’t understood the maths. The most important part to understand is the intuition behind estimating causal effects.
There is still more analysis to be done on the Sport England dataset, so expect more from this in future articles.
Footnotes
1 Sport England notes that ‘…Climbing and bouldering and Hill and mountain walking were part of the online survey only in [2016 and 2017] of the survey, and part of the full online and postal survey for [2018] onwards.
2 Total figures calculated by adding male participation to female participation. For some years, this figure varies (by less than 3%) from the total figure published by Sport England.
3 See Difference-in-Differences estimation.