  Sport climbing, which made its Olympic debut at the 2020 Summer Games,
generally consists of three separate disciplines: speed climbing, bouldering,
and lead climbing. However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) only
allowed one set of medals each for men and women in sport climbing. As a
result, the governing body of sport climbing, rather than choosing only one of
the three disciplines to include in the Olympics, decided to create a
competition combining all three disciplines. In order to determine a winner, a
combined scoring system was created using the product of the ranks across the
three disciplines to determine an overall score for each climber. In this work,
the rank-product scoring system of sport climbing is evaluated through
simulation to investigate its general features, specifically, the advancement
probabilities and scores for climbers given certain placements. Additionally,
analyses of historical climbing contest results are presented and real examples
of violations of the independence of irrelevant alternatives are illustrated.
Finally, this work finds evidence that the current competition format is
putting speed climbers at a disadvantage.
