This is boulder coach Udo Neumann’s personal report of the last two Boulder World Cups of the 2014 season in Haiyang, China and Laval, France.

BWC Haiyang:
It should be noted that the World Cup in Haiyang was a very weak one, taking place in a ghost town without any real spectators. As a result (?), route setting was weak too, but these issues are the subject of another analysis in the future, let’s talk about the bouldering instead for now!
Before these two world cups, Jan Hojer and Dmitry Sharafutdinov were just a view points apart, as were Shauna Coxsey and Akiyo Noguchi.
Jan and Dmitri were looking forward to a friendly death match when Dmitri ran into some personal problems that clearly were not helping his bouldering. For the first time in ages he failed to qualify for the finals.
Especially at the end of the season Shauna and Akiyo climbed clearly better than the other girls through all the rounds.
Haiyang was won by Akiyo Noguchi and Jan Hojer.

BWC Laval:
The nation that hosts a boulder world cup is allowed to nominate 12 men and 12 women. If the hosting country is a strong climbing nation, like Austria or France, even the 12th best guy most likely is a very strong climber in his own right. There are so many strong boulderers in the world nowadays that you can easily can miss semis even if you are Dmitri Sharafutdinov.
One after another was climbing the problems that Dmitri had failed on this day and at the end MICKAEL MAWEM was the one kicking Dmitri out of the competition.
That meant that Jan had one the Boulder World Cup 2014. For the boys, the only question remaining was if Gui-Gui would end up second in the world cup – but he needed a victory to do so!
That didn’t happen since Rustam Gelmanov secured the victory in Laval.

The ladies final could not have been more gripping. Shauna Coxsey had a black out on the first problem and needed too many tries for the second bloc. After 2 problems, the finals looked like a battle between Akiyo, Juliane Wurm and Miho Nonoka. But than Akiyo, and Juliane failed to climb problem #3 and everything seemed possible again. At the end though, it was Akiyo, Juliane and Miho, what meant that Akiyo had secured her third overall Boulder World cup title!