Ashima Shiraishi was arguably the strongest female climber in the world when she was 13, Tommy Caldwell won a climbing competition against some world-class talent at 16, and it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds climb hard at gyms with good youth competition programs. Grades that used to be reserved for the best in the world (5.13+) are climbed nightly by kids at any number of gyms throughout the world. At my local gym, where a large number of former full time climbers get their fix, the competition high school kids are very often the strongest climbers in the room.

It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing.

The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.)

In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem).

> I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention...

Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees":

Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference.

"let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them.

"Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below.

Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.