On the evening of 10 May, under the lights of the Fenhu Culture and Sports Center in Wujiang, Aleksandra Mirosław reached the top of the wall first once more. The Pole took gold in the women's Speed event at the World Climbing Series Wujiang 2026, ahead of the neutral athlete Elizaveta Ivanova in silver and Indonesia's Desak Made Rita Kusuma Dewi in bronze. It was the opening Speed round of the new season, and the champion answered it in the manner the discipline has come to expect of her.
A faster field, an old certainty
The season announced itself before the finals began. Wujiang produced the fastest qualification round the sport has seen, for both women and men. The women needed 6.67 seconds simply to reach the final, against a previous best cut-off of 7.08 seconds set in Chamonix a year earlier. The wall had grown crowded with the young and the quick. Twenty-eight women went under seven seconds. On the same night, seventeen-year-old Zhao Yicheng broke the men's world record with 4.54 seconds, a mark of how far the standard had risen over a single winter.
Into that noise stepped Mirosław, thirty-two years old and reading the lanes with the calm of long habit. The finals in Speed are not a race against the clock alone but against the climber in the next lane, a matter of nerve as much as pace. She held hers. Where others pressed and slipped, she delivered the runs that mattered, and the podium settled around her: Ivanova and Dewi behind, the gold in Polish hands to begin the year.
The last climbs of a long ascent
The context gives the result its weight. Mirosław is a two-time Olympic champion, in Tokyo in 2021 and again in Paris in 2024, where she remains Poland's defining figure in the sport. She has owned the discipline's last ten world records, the current standard a barrier-breaking 6.03 seconds set on the Olympic final wall in Paris. Few athletes in any sport have so completely defined the shape of their event.
This gold, though, carries a different colour. In February, on her thirty-second birthday, Mirosław announced that 2026 would be her final season. Wujiang was among the last chances to see her on the international circuit, before a farewell in front of a home crowd in Kraków in July. She has been plain about her state of mind. "Just a few more starts and this chapter will come to an end," she wrote of the months ahead.
She is leaving while still first to the top. In Wujiang, on a wall built for a faster generation, the record-holder simply climbed her own way, once more.
