Incredible India
If you have never been to Mumbai before it is probably quite a flash in the beginning. The noise, crowds, cars, TukTuks, food, the smell (which definitely takes some getting used to), the monsoon, the completely different culture – all these experiences at temperatures beyond 30 degrees. To focus on the competition is possibly nowhere harder.
Some climbing teams brought their own food and only ate in their hotel rooms in order to stay healthy. Team Austria has been in Mumbai last year already, we’ve found a very good restaurant which we attended every evening. Indian food at its finest!! So incredibly good!
Medical view
Watching the athletes during the comp I noticed that many climbers are on their range-of-motion limit: stretching out in order to barely reach that volume on the other end of their physical possible range. This complex variations of the sport and the tendency to injure big joints still seem to be a big topic.
For the competitor the main health issue here in India is nevertheless food poisoning. Most athletes were scared of getting a bad diarrhea, which some of them actually did. But it happened less than last year, when India hosted its first Worldcup ever. Team Austria was fine though – no food and injury issues.
Cultural differences
A female competitor from the Islamic Republic of Iran suffered from shoulder pain during the qualification, however she made it into semis for the first time. Treating her at the muscelus deltoideus combined with more rotator cuff muscles allowed her to move nearly pain free in the physiological range of motion. The shoulder was stable after the treatment. I told her to see an expert in Iran, after the comp.
The treatment itself was nothing new. But treating a woman from the islamic Iran in a hotel room definitely was. In order to avoid cultural differences we organized that she was accompanied by a female friend. In the hotel lobby there was one additional person, a man who was always by their side, to make sure that the women of the Iranian Climbing Team behave according to the social rules of Iran. That means they are not allowed to remove their headscarf for example. Back home in Teheran there are even certain times when only women train in the climbing gym. Of course they also wouldn’t be allowed to see a man in a hotel room. But in this case it was a medical issue, the patient was not alone and so they made an exception. The climber was really thankful that I could help her so that she could climb her fist semifinals. And I was happy because she performed well and I got the best safran from Iran. 🙂
