Alex Megos repeats King Capella
- Tuesday 23rd November 2021
Alex Megos has made the second ascent of King Capella (F9b+) at Siurana.
King Capella was originally climbed by Will Bosi earlier this year - click through here for our report on Will’s ascent. Straight after Will made the first ascent Alex Megos quickly stepped-in for a quick burn to try the moves.
It seems Megos was immediately attracted to the route given his comments on Instagram: “That was the route I came to Siurana for, after checking it out once last March, right after @will_bosi made the FA. Already back then I realized that it suites me pretty well, so together with @jenya_kazbekova we decided to spend a few weeks in Spain to have enough time for hard routes.”
Unsurprisingly, King Capella didn’t go down without a fight. Megos describes his efforts saying: “After nine days on the route and two splits later I could get the first repeat of this very short and very crimpy test piece.”
As previously reported, Bosi took ten days to do the first ascent of King Capella so Megos’s own ascent is roughly in the same ball-park. Bosi, had previously dispatched La Capella (F9b) in just three days.
At the time of writing, Megos has yet to comment about the grade of King Capella. It seems however than Alex used a different method from Will for one of the moves: “I also used slightly different beta than Will taking a very wide pinch, which felt a little easier to me than what Will did. He couldn't do the move the way I did it though, so I guess it's personal preference.” Given Alex’s comments some are saying that this might be suggestive of a different grade but, as we say, currently Alex has been silent on the grade for King Capella.
Many climbers take a ‘day count’ – i.e. the time to climb a route – as a proxy for the difficulty of the route. In this case it’s interesting to remember that Alex took 15 days on the first ascent of Perfecto Mundo at Margalef but 60 days for the first ascent of Bibliography at Ceuse; both routes are now graded F9b+. Remember too that Bosi took 40 days to repeat Mutation at Raven Tor, a route he suggested was “solid at F9a+” but which he considered might be F9b. As a short bouldery route it’s clear that King Capella ‘suits’ both Bosi and Megos and given it’s a different style it’s probably that day count isn’t a good indicator for difficulty. For now it seems that King Capella remains F9b+ and as such one of the hardest sport routes climbed.