The 16-year-old French star Enzo Oddo has clipped the chains of his fourth 5.15a, sending La Rambla yesterday in Siurana, Spain.

Planet Mountain reports that Oddo tried the 45-meter La Rambla around 25 times before gaining success on what was once considered the hardest route in Spain. German ace Alexander Huber first climbed La Rambla in 1994 and his ascent can be seen in the climbing film Masters of Stone IV. Huber also graded La Rambla 8c+ (5.14c) and the route remained unrepeated until 2003. Ramon Julian Puigblanque claimed the second ascent and extended Huber’s original line with a traverse into the neighboring route La Reina Mora. After Puigblanque’s second ascent and the subsequent extension of La Rambla, the grade of the route became 9a+ (5.15a).

Whether or not the traverse extension makes La Rambla more difficult has been debated. In a 2008 interview with Planet Mountain, Huber voiced his doubts saying, “It's a fact that La Rambla increased in grade from 8c+ to 9a+. Often people believe this is due to the route extension, but in reality the difficulties do not change substantially with this extension. The difficulty in traversing from the Rambla belay rightwards to finish up Reina Mora, compared to the crux on La Rambla, is not relevant.”

Huber cites Wolfgang Gullich’s route Action Direct as the standard by which he graded his routes. Considering that Action Direct was graded 8c+ (5.14c) by Gullich in 1995, Huber graded La Rambla 8c+.

“La Rambla isn't harder than Action Direct and therefore cannot be harder than 9a,” says Huber. “Nowadays Action Direct is considered to be the benchmark 9a, so both Weisse Rose [another Huber route] and La Rambla turned into 9a. And if you take Action Direct as a reference for 9a, then I believe many current top routes are considerably overgraded.”

La Rambla and Weisse Rose are not the only Huber routes to have received an upgrade. In 2008 Adam Ondra repeated Open Air for the route’s second ascent. Huber established Open Air in 1996 and graded it 9a (5.14d). Ondra upgraded the route to 9a+ (5.15a), writing on 8a.nu, “Now when [Action Directe] is 9a, [Open Air] should be 9a+.”  

Also worth noting, Puigblanque’s La Reina Mora, which he established in 2008 and graded 8c (5.14b), has now been upgraded twice. Last year Nico Favresse made the route’s second ascent and gave it a personal grade of 8c+ (5.14c) and a few days ago the prolific Spaniard Dani Andrada cranked the third ascent, explaining on his blog that the route was most likely 8c+/9a or even 9a.

Here is a video of Chris Sharma making the third ascent of La Rambla.

Here is another cool video of Nico Favresse making the second ascent of La Reina Mora.

VIDEO PROFILE: BD athlete Nico Favresse on La Reina Mora (8c+) in Siurana, Spain from Black Diamond Equipment on Vimeo.

[Top: Enzo Oddo crushing in France. Photo by Joe Kinder.]