The 11th marked the first day of the Tibetan New Year, with people across Tibet celebrating the year’s biggest festival in traditional ways. While his fellow villagers back home were enjoying the Tibetan New Year, Sorang Gyatso, a post-90s Tibetan athlete, was thousands of miles away in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, climbing and training on cold cliffs—this was how he spent the Tibetan New Year.
This was already the seventh Tibetan New Year he has spent away from home. For Sorang Gyatso, the New Year only means one extra day off compared to usual. During the Tibetan New Year period, he spends most of his time training continuously on the cliffs, striving to advance his climbing career.
This year, the Eve of the Lunar New Year and the “Guthuk” (a kind of dough ball) night of the Tibetan New Year fell on the same day. On the 9th, Sorang Gyatso had a rest and in the evening went with his teammates to coach Ding Chengliang’s home for a reunion dinner. On the 10th, they had a day off, and from the 11th, Sorang Gyatso started training again. To him, the New Year is just a long holiday, because normally it’s train for three days and rest for one, but during the New Year he gets two days off.
Sorang Gyatso is from Mainling County, Nyingchi Prefecture, Tibet Autonomous Region, born in 1991. As a rising star in China’s climbing scene in recent years, he won the men’s difficulty event championship at the 2011 National Rock Climbing Championships and the men’s championship at the 2012 Himalaya National Rock Climbing Invitational.
Since entering the Tibet Mountaineering School in September 2006 and later receiving professional rock climbing training in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, Sorang Gyatso has spent every Tibetan New Year away from home. He told reporters that his mother had once again mentioned how her son hadn’t come home for yet another year. “My older brother and sister are both there, only I’m missing—thinking about it, it’s still quite regrettable,” he said.
Sorang Gyatso does get to go home every summer, as most of his training is scheduled in winter, leaving relatively more free time in summer. But even though he has slightly more time in summer, each time he goes home he can only stay for about a week. Summer is busy with competitions, winter with training—Sorang Gyatso’s year is packed solid.
In the current bitter winter, Sorang Gyatso has a rather heavy training load, needing to train six hours a day, almost all on the cliffs. In the period leading up to the festival, there was a continuous drop in temperature, and the training hall had no centralized heating—the cliffs in Jiangxi’s winter were especially icy. Sorang Gyatso said that sometimes when grabbing onto rocks on the cliff, his heart would feel a bit cold too, but he had to keep training—his climbing career couldn’t do without perseverance. Saying this, Sorang Gyatso laughed heartily on the other end of the phone.
The young athlete told reporters that he plans to take part in several competitions in 2013, including two stops of the IFSC Climbing World Cup in China. He said that last year he won quite a few second places, and in the new year he aims to push hard for the national championship. To this end, Sorang Gyatso has increased the intensity of his training, hoping to greet the new year’s various competitions in better form.