Ashima Shiraishi, Rock-Climbing Prodigy | The New Yorker
“Then her father stepped in,” Marcovallo recalled. “He wouldn’t allow Yuki to show her anything anymore. And so Yuki wouldn’t even look at her, because the father was there.” Marcovallo recalled that in those early years, once Ashima showed promise, she often wanted to run around in the playground with other kids her age, or even hang out with a crew of high-school students who did parkour tricks on a different part of the rock. “But her father always insisted she climb, climb, climb,” Marcovallo said. “I actually remember him saying it: ‘Climb!’ And there was lots of tears and drama. Our hearts went out to her. We all wondered, How is this going to play out?” As Marcovallo recalled, Ashima’s aunt persuaded her father to relent and let her run around a bit in the playground—and then Ashima started to want to climb on her own. “She started to crush it,” Marcovallo said. “She’d do the Polish Traverse”—a horizontal route on the rock’s north wall—“like nobody’s business. I remember when she was trying some difficult problem on the west side of the rock. When she didn’t do it, she’d cry.” Tears, still, but now over wanting to climb well, rather than not at all. Some of the Rat Rock regulars worried that, as one put it, “there’s a Svengali thing going on here.” But they started to see the results. “And look at her now!” one said. “Maybe that’s what it takes.” (Ashima and her father deny that there was ever tension between them or with Yuki. In general, Ashima is dismissive of any Svengali talk. “I climb for myself,” she told me.) Marcovallo also remembers the day that he and some others were idly talking about climbing shoes and Ashima exclaimed, “I’m sponsored!” (She now has endorsement deals with Clif Bar, The North Face, Petzl, and Evolv.)
When Ashima was seven, Poppo began taking her around to climbing gyms in the area. In White Plains, they found a coach named Obe Carrion, a muscular Puerto Rican from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had been a national champion. Carrion was going to teach her some real technique, and perhaps serve as a buffer between Ashima and her father. Not long afterward, she won the nationals for the first time. Carrion worked with her for almost four years, but eventually, amid tension with Poppo, he quit and moved West. “It was a bit too much for me,” Carrion recalled. “It wasn’t good for me to focus all my energy on one child.”
The first film of Ashima, “Rock Little Angel: Dreaming Rat,” was shot by family friends, when she was eight, at Rat Rock. In some respects, it is less a proclamation of talent than a meditation on precocity. It features the eerie music of Nocturnal Emissions, an English sound-art collective, which had served as the accompaniment for some of Poppo’s Butoh performances. Rat Rock comes off as a strange, wild place, and Ashima as a mystical nymph. Sometimes you get the sense that she isn’t so much an athlete as an art project.
Though still a girl, and very much under the sway of her father, Ashima is shrewd about her career and oddly self-sufficient where business is concerned. She has had no professional representation of any kind. She handles her own press. When she has had to sign contracts, her parents review them, but because they don’t read English very well, she said, “they have no idea what’s going on.” Just before Christmas, however, she met with RXR Sports, the agency that represents the free soloist Alex Honnold and many other climbers, to discuss the possibility of her becoming a client.
As with gymnastics and figure skating, there are many cases of climbing prodigies, especially girls, who are phenoms at twelve and done by twenty. “They don’t want to be pawns anymore,” Josh Lowell, the Big Up filmmaker, said. Priorities, and bodies, change. Tori Allen, who grew up in Benin, was known for the stuffed animal she kept clipped to her harness, as a nod to a childhood spent climbing trees with a pet monkey. She was a professional by the age of twelve, an X Games champion at fourteen. She attracted endorsements, and hype, to the point where people on the climbing scene began to resent her. (They called her climbing’s Anna Kournikova.) She quit competitive climbing in favor of pole-vaulting, which got her a scholarship at Florida State. “Now I climb for fun, not for grades, medals, or magazines,” Allen, who is twenty-seven, told me. “I know a lot of climbers still climbing now who were at their peak ten years ago. They’re living six to a condo in Boulder, training to go get fourth place. Some of them have college degrees. What motivates them? When are they going to give it up?”
Ashima seems to view climbing as a venue for accomplishment rather than as a ground for adventure. “Climbing used to be for the misfits who couldn’t catch a ball or the small kids like me who got cut from the baseball team,” Lowell said. “Now it’s for élite athletes. They’re trying to perform a perfect ten.” It’s a particularly unromantic strain of rock ratting; the wild allure—wandering the continent, living out of a car—has been bred out of it. Or perhaps, for Ashima, it’s just down the road.
The Shiraishis’ loft is in the garment district, five flights up in an old sewing factory. The elevator is ancient and balky, and so the family walk up and down. The apartment is two thousand square feet: seven hundred and fifty dollars a month. Ashima and her mother sleep on bunk beds in a back bedroom otherwise occupied by Poppo’s archives of videotapes, records, books, and press clippings. Ashima sleeps on the bottom bunk. Poppo’s bed is out in the main space, in a corner. One part of the loft is a kind of playpen, a fenced-off area cluttered with Ashima’s old toys and art work. Ashima’s favorite book is Haruki Murakami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.” Her favorite movie is “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” (“I love Audrey Hepburn.”) But she doesn’t really have time for movies. She likes to watch the Knicks when she can.
Her mother has a bob and dresses in painter’s pants and long jackets. She is in her mid-sixties. She has never tried to climb. “I’m not athletic anything,” she says. “I make the pants.” Ashima’s parents are very attuned to her weight. In October, she was eighty-two pounds. “She’s too skinny,” Poppo told me. “It’s too light. Needs more food. Six months ago, she was a hundred pounds.” This swing seems extreme, as does the attention to weight generally, but the concern is pure physics—the strength-to-weight question. Ashima is trying to optimize. Her parents were trying to get her to eat more. “Professional climbers keep giving her advice,” Poppo said. “Gluten-free. But not enough calories. My wife said, before world championships, ‘Skinny better than fat.’ But yesterday I told her, ‘You take a little bit more food.’ ” He had a number in mind. “She’s a little bit chubby at ninety. She needs eighty-eight.” By Christmas, when she went to Japan on a bouldering trip, she was eighty-eight.
Of greater concern to them is sleep. Ashima often gets just five or six hours. She arrives home from climbing at eight-thirty in the evening, showers and eats, and then starts in on her schoolwork, which she insists on finishing. She’s often up well past midnight. “We say, ‘Don’t do homework!’ ” Tsuya said. When I asked her if Ashima got straight A’s, she said, “Yes. Well, sometimes she gets A-plus.”
Ashima is a freshman at Rudolf Steiner, a private school on the Upper East Side. It’s a Waldorf school—progressive, tactile, artsy—where kids make their own books and tools. The high school is in a town house a block south of Michael Bloomberg’s. Ashima started at Steiner when she was three and had Dena Malon as her main teacher in grades one through eight. This year, Malon is on a sabbatical, in part to clear her mind after eight years with the same group of kids and to prepare for the next group. “It’s my aim to let go of them,” Malon said. Ashima is one of the more difficult ones to let go of: “She works harder than anyone I know. I’ve never met anyone like her.” Ashima has friends there but hardly has time to hang out with them outside of school.
Ashima intends to leave Steiner after this year for the Professional Children’s School, a midtown high school that gives its students, many of them actors, models, or musicians, a chance to have flexible schedules. “Normal people can go, too,” Ashima told me.
Earlier this fall, Ashima flew to Boston with her parents to compete in the Heist, an annual all-female competition at a climbing gym in Watertown. (At most competitions, the women compete, and then the men. At the Heist, the women are the main and only event.) The Shiraishis were staying at a Best Western nearby, with a Japanese film crew from Fuji TV that had been following them around for almost a year for a series about Ashima, called “The Spider Girl,” which was big in Japan.
This was the third Heist. Everyone involved seemed to speak wistfully of the year before, when Ashima competed for the first time against top grownup professional climbers. She had beat both Alex Puccio, the nine-time national bouldering champion, and Delaney Miller, one of the country’s best climbers. Neither was back this year. The most notable competition was Meagan Martin, a powerful twenty-four-year-old climber known for her appearances on “American Ninja Warrior.”
The qualifying round stretched into the afternoon. Dozens of girls and young women in shorts and leggings crawled all over the walls or reclined on the heavily padded floors. Squalls of encouragement sprang up here and there, as putative competitors egged each other on. This was not the edgy green-eyed atmosphere of the gymnastics academy or the figure-skating rink. Ashima and Poppo wandered around, scouting the more difficult problems. Little crowds gathered to watch her nail each one. The gym’s head route setter, a coach named Shane Messer, watched her on the hardest, and he said that she was the only one in the gym capable of completing it. “There’s still a difference between the men and the women, but the girls are getting really close,” he said. “Ashima is stronger than, let’s say, all but twenty dudes in the world.”
There were six women in the finals, which were held in the evening. The climbers mustered in an empty section of the gym, away from their parents or their coaches. The organizer had rigged a giant white sheet over the championship course—it hid two bouldering problems and a sport-climbing route. The gym filled with several hundred spectators, most of them practitioners or parents attuned to the sport’s nuances. After a while, amid loud music and colored lights, the finalists were introduced, the curtain fell away, and the competitors got fifteen minutes to stalk the base of the wall, studying the routes. They moved in a cluster, gesturing at invisible handholds, as though reaching for fireflies, and even occasionally shared their impressions and tactical notions with one another. Ashima ran over to her father and retrieved a pair of binoculars. She peered up at the higher reaches of the roped route. He watched from the back of the gym, taut with an unappeasable urge to share beta.