Erin McNeice takes her first Boulder Gold in Bern
- Tuesday 17th June 2025
Erin McNeice took her first gold medal in Boulder at the IFSC World Cup in Bern last week; Yufei Pan of China took the men’s gold.
Erin McNeice’s march into the upper echelons of female competition climbers has been relentless, consistent and determined. Having taken two bronze medals at previous World Cup Boulder events – Seoul in October 2024 and Keqiano in April of this year – Erin has been threatening more; the Bern event over the weekend was when she broke through and took her first-ever Boulder gold.
By adding a Boulder gold to the two Lead golds Erin scooped at Wujiang and Bali earlier this year, Erin has become the first ever British woman to get gold in both Boulder and Lead. Even more remarkable is that she’s earned that distinction in the same season, just weeks apart! Since finishing fifth in the Combined at the 2024 Paris Olympics – itself a super impressive achievement – Erin has continued to deliver the very best results consistently across both categories. Amongst those currently competing in 2025 in both Boulder and Lead, no other athlete has taken double golds this year; only Annie Sanders has come close to Erin’s results with a Boulder Gold (at Keqiao) and a Lead bronze (at Wujiang).
To put Erin’s double gold achievement into context, only Janja Garnbret – widely considered the best women’s Combined climber ever – has ever achieved the double golds in a season. Take a bow, Erin!
Talking after the competition, Erin said, “I feel so happy, elated, and quite shocked! I want to do all the European World Cups and there are quite a lot of them. I decided to skip the American competitions so that I could have a chance to train between the Asian and the European tours.” Having taken double golds, she was very happy to have ticked her goal: “It feels pretty good to win gold in both disciplines, it’s been a massive long-term goal for me and it’s good to tick it off.”
Joining Erin on the podium in Bern were Annie Sanders and Miho Nonaka. The slimmest of margins separated Sanders and Nonaka – just 0.1 points in fact; both topped three boulders and got the zone on the fourth. Erin alone topped all four boulders in the finals, flashing two in the process. Erin finished on 99.5 points whilst Annie and Miho ended the competition on 84.4 and 84.3 points respectively.
Over in the men’s competition, Chinese athlete Yufei Pan took his first ever Boulder gold, improving his previous best result – fifth in Prague earlier this year – by some considerable margin. His victory in Bern was all the more impressive given that he out-climbed Sorato Anraku and Mejdi Schalck, both of whom have scooped multiple medals in Boulder already this year; Anraku having taken three golds and a silver whilst Schalck has collected one gold and two silvers. In addition to both Anraku and Schalck, Dohyun Lee was also looking in impressive form in Bern, getting a runaway score of over 30 points more than his nearest rival (Sorato Anraku) in the semi-finals. Pan, Schalck and Anraku all topped three blocs each in the finals, ending the round tightly packed points-wise on 84.2, 84.1 and 83.7 points respectively.
Several other Team GB athletes were also in action in Bern. In the men’s, Dayan Akhtar made his second ever final finishing in 8th, Jack MacDougall in 25th, Sam Butterworth in 49th, Toby Roberts in joint 51st and Nathan Whaley in 54th. Emma Edwards finished the semi-finals in 16th.
The next competition will be in Innsbruck, Austria in late June.