Janja Garnbret has used her post-qualifying media platform at the Wujiang Lead World Cup to push back on the event's scheduling, with the two-time Olympic champion describing Friday's session as "a very long day" and asking the IFSC to compress semi-finals and finals into a single later programme.
The two-time Olympic champion's intervention is the highest-profile athlete-welfare comment of the 2026 World Cup season so far and carries significant weight inside the IFSC governance discussion.
"Having qualis and semis the same day, it's a very long day," Garnbret said. "Today I wake up at 5.45am, then you start warming up around 7am and if you also have semis in the same day, you may not finish until around 11pm; that's a very long day. So, I prefer semis and final on the same day."
The Slovenian, who has won the women's lead overall title in seven of the past eight seasons, has been a regular voice in IFSC athlete-representation meetings and a thoughtful but firm advocate for revisiting the federation's competition calendar. Her Wujiang comments mark the first time in the 2026 season she has publicly criticised an event's scheduling.
The specific Wujiang programme runs qualifying on Friday May 8 starting at 9am local time, with semi-finals on Saturday at 10:30am and finals on Saturday evening at 7pm. Garnbret's preference would see the qualifying day shortened and the semi-final/final compressed into a single late-evening block on Saturday or Sunday.
The IFSC has wrestled with similar scheduling decisions across the 2026 season opener in Keqiao, where boulder finals ran late into the evening and prompted a separate round of athlete feedback. The federation introduced a revised schedule template ahead of the 2026 season after consultations with the IFSC Athletes' Commission, but Wujiang's compressed two-day window has produced complications for the lead format specifically.
Lead, unlike boulder, depends on a single 4-6 minute attempt up a single route per round, with the wall reset between rounds. That single-attempt format means longer rest blocks for athletes between climbs but tighter scheduling constraints for the broadcaster, who must hit prime-time windows in target markets.
"I prefer semis and final on the same day," Garnbret said. The proposal echoes recent World Athletics scheduling changes that have moved heat-to-final compression to a single evening programme in select disciplines.
The broader athlete welfare debate has been intensifying across multiple IFSC events in 2026. The Wujiang stop arrives weeks after the Keqiao boulder opener, where multiple finalists including comeback stories like Italy's Melina Costanza and Belgium's Hannes Van Duysen spoke about the toll of long competition days on injury recovery.
Garnbret's qualifying performance in Wujiang itself was unaffected by the scheduling complaint. She topped out comfortably on her route, easing into the semi-finals as the women's favourite.
"I thought qualification was too easy," she said. "It got hard in maybe the last four or five moves, but I think tomorrow is another day and I think semis and final will be harder, and I hope I can show my best there."
The semi-finals begin at 10:30am Saturday local time, with the finals at 7pm. Coverage is live on the World Climbing YouTube channel with regional broadcasters handling the rest of the global feed.
The IFSC's full 2026 calendar runs through to the season-ending event in Santiago, Chile in October, with Wujiang serving as one of three stops in China across the year. The Chilean event will be the first IFSC World Cup ever held in Chile and only the second in South American history.