The Mythical Grade Is Real: Jakob Schubert Confirms 5.15d with Historic Repeat of DNA
For nearly a decade, the hardest sport climbing grade on earth existed in a kind of scientific limbo — proposed but never proven, accepted by a community that had no choice but to take one man's word for it. That changed on the afternoon of October 10, 2026, in the limestone gorge country of southern France, when an Austrian climber lowered off a 55-meter line in the Verdon Gorge and wept. The grade of 5.15d, long a theoretical ceiling, had finally been confirmed by a second pair of hands.
On the afternoon of October 10, Austrian climber Jakob Schubert made the second ascent of DNA (9c/5.15d), a 55-meter route in France's Verdon Gorge. Since Schubert aligned with Bouin on his proposed grade, this also makes DNA the world's first confirmed 5.15d route. The sport climbing world, watching through phone screens and laptop browsers, exhaled a collective breath that had been held since 2017.
Understanding the Weight of the Grade
To fully grasp what Schubert's ascent means, you need to understand what sport climbing grades actually represent — and how verification works at the game's absolute frontier. Unlike other sports where records are settled by stopwatches or measuring tapes, climbing grades at the highest level are proposed by the first ascensionist and only solidified when another elite climber corroborates the difficulty. The process is imperfect, subjective, and entirely dependent on a tiny pool of humans who are even physically capable of attempting these routes.
For years, the grade of the five hardest climbs in the world — a difficulty level called 5.15d — remained unconfirmed, since only one person had climbed each one. Think about that: routes acknowledged by the global climbing community as potentially the hardest ever completed, yet unverifiable because the talent required to test them is so rare that repeat ascents were not just difficult — they were nearly impossible to arrange.
In the near-decade since Adam Ondra established Silence (9c/5.15d) in 2017, the world's hardest sport grade has remained only theoretical. Since then, four more climbers have proposed routes at the grade, but none had been repeated. The grade cluster at 5.15d grew slowly, each new proposal received with excitement but also with the caveat that it was one person's assessment against the most extreme difficulty in the history of the sport.
The Route: DNA and the Verdon Gorge
A Line Born from Years of Obsession
DNA is located in the Verdon Gorge in France, and is characterized by extreme overhang terrain and multiple difficult bouldering-style cruxes. The Verdon Gorge — a dramatic river canyon carved into the limestone plateau of Haute-Provence — is one of Europe's premier climbing destinations, drawing athletes from across the world to its technical faces and sweeping walls. The sector of La Ramirole, where DNA lives, is among its most demanding.
PlanetMountain reported that Bouin scoped and bolted DNA in 2019, then worked the project over multiple seasons before completing the first ascent in April 2022. His journey to sending the route, which involved over 250 attempts, appeared in the Reel Rock film series. That documentary coverage brought the route to mainstream audiences — or at least, the mainstream audience of devoted climbing fans — and established DNA as something more than just another hard route. It became a narrative: a French climber obsessing over a 55-meter strip of limestone long enough to age meaningfully through the process.
Bouin made the first ascent of DNA in April 2022 after nearly 200 days of projecting and roughly 250 attempts. He described the route as the most challenging project of his career. Bouin debated between suggesting 9b+ (5.15c) and 9c (5.15d) before proposing 9c (5.15d), describing it as a proposal that would require repeat attempts to confirm or adjust. That intellectual honesty — acknowledging that a first ascensionist's grade is inherently a starting point rather than a verdict — is part of what makes climbing's grading culture both maddening and admirable. Bouin wasn't claiming certainty. He was issuing an invitation.
What the Route Demands
DNA is located in La Ramirole, Verdon and features 50 meters of extremely sustained and difficult climbing. Unlike some benchmark routes that hinge on a single, devastating crux move, DNA distributes its punishment across the entire wall. Schubert said DNA felt similar to B.I.G., and he felt it's certainly a 5.15d climb, but the projecting process was more daunting, due to the complex beta. "There's so many more small, hard sections you need to learn," he explained.
The route is also unusual for how brutally it penalizes shorter climbers. "It's a very morphological route," explained Schubert, who stands 5'9". "The shorter you are, the harder the route gets. At some point, it would probably be impossible. I'm only borderline tall enough." That admission is significant. Schubert is one of the best climbers alive, and he considers himself barely tall enough to have a chance on this route. For shorter elite climbers — of whom there are many — DNA may be physically unachievable at any level of fitness or technique. Height is a prerequisite, not just an advantage.
Jakob Schubert: The Man Who Makes the Impossible Look Inevitable
A Career Built for This Moment
Schubert, a two-time Olympic bronze medalist, is one of the most accomplished climbers of all time. In 2023, he became the first climber to complete routes at both the highest sport-climbing grade and the hardest bouldering grade in the world, with the first ascent of B.I.G. and a send of Shawn Raboutou's Alphane V17 in Ticino, Switzerland. To put that in perspective: conquering both the top of sport climbing and the top of bouldering in the same calendar year is the equivalent of holding world records in the marathon and the 100-meter sprint simultaneously. The physical demands of each discipline are nearly opposite, yet Schubert operates at the peak of both.
He won his first Lead Climbing World Cup in 2011 when he was aged 20. Now, aged 35, he still seems to be at the top of his game. There is much more, with Jakob having climbed 2 x 9b+, 5 x 9b, and a great many 9a+ and 9as. He's also climbed multiple 9A boulder problems, including Alphane, Shaolin and Mount Doom, which is impressive for someone who wouldn't profess themselves as a 'boulder specialist'.
The route suited Schubert's strengths, with his competition and sport climbing pedigree putting him in a particularly good position. His competition background — decades of training for precision under pressure, of executing memorized sequences on demand — translates directly to the kind of work that DNA requires. The route is not a puzzle you solve with brute strength alone. It's a memorization challenge laid over a physical one, and Schubert's career has been one long education in exactly that combination.
The Long Road to the Send
Schubert first started trying DNA (5.15d) in 2024. His initial sessions yielded nothing close to success, but that was expected. Schubert estimated that he spent 30 days on it total. That's 30 days spread across multiple visits to the Verdon — each trip requiring the coordination of peak physical condition, weather windows, and the slow accumulation of route knowledge that defines projecting at this level.
He came back again recently to work the route, and sent it on his ninth attempt of the week. That framing — "ninth attempt of the week" — led to predictable confusion online, which Schubert addressed directly. "Some people read 'ninth live attempt' on YouTube, and think this is basically my ninth try on the route, which is obviously far from the truth," Schubert said. Each livestreamed redpoint attempt is the visible tip of an enormous iceberg of preparation: unlocking individual sequences, linking sections, falling repeatedly on the same move at the same height until the body stops failing there.
The beta Schubert used was not identical to Bouin's. Schubert had to adjust some of the beta for DNA from first ascensionist Seb Bouin since he is shorter than the French climber. This is a detail that carries real weight. At 5.15d, the difference between a sequence working and not working can come down to centimeters of reach. Schubert effectively had to solve portions of the route independently, finding new body positions and movement patterns suited to his own dimensions — all while operating at a difficulty that almost no one on Earth can even approximate.
The Livestream: 180,000 Witnesses to History
One of the defining features of Schubert's major sends is his decision to broadcast the process. As Schubert made the first 5.15d repeat in history, some 180,000 people were watching. He livestreamed his DNA ascent on YouTube, just as he did with B.I.G. back in 2023. The numbers are remarkable for a sport that sits outside the mainstream American sports ecosystem — 180,000 concurrent viewers is a level of engagement that most niche sports would envy at any stage, let alone for an unscheduled climbing attempt in a French gorge.
Schubert's ascent of DNA was not his first time bringing a high-level, high-stakes project to a live audience. In September 2023, he also livestreamed his redpoint attempts on B.I.G. That consistency — treating the public as worthy participants in the experience rather than after-the-fact consumers of highlight clips — has built him a following that feels invested rather than merely impressed. When Schubert lowered from the wall after DNA, the reaction of those 180,000 viewers wasn't passive. They had watched the failures, understood the stakes, and shared in the moment.
There's a philosophical dimension here too. Schubert said that although livestreaming offers an intimate look at what a 5.15d ascent looks like, he noted that by the time he's doing redpoints, he's already put in the hardest work. The livestream captures the dramatic arc, but the real story is invisible — the training blocks, the hangs on specific holds, the video analysis, the nutrition and sleep and the management of tendons that are being pushed to their physiological limits.
The Grading Question: What DNA Confirms and What Remains Open
The First Confirmed 5.15d
The confirmation of DNA's grade is more than a formality. In a discipline where grades function as the primary currency of achievement, a confirmed grade has a fundamentally different status than a proposed one. With DNA, the 35-year-old Schubert has become both the first climber in history to repeat a proposed 5.15d route, as well as the first to climb two.
Schubert's grade confirmation came through Instagram. On Instagram after his send, Schubert confirmed DNA's 5.15d rating. "DNA is way less my style than B.I.G. and for sure the hardest route I've ever done (for me personally)," he wrote. "I feel like I learned so much from projecting this route." That personal qualifier — "for me personally" — is crucial. Schubert is not claiming DNA is objectively harder than B.I.G. He's acknowledging the inherently individual nature of difficulty at this level.
The Morphology Problem and What It Means for Grades
The height-dependence of DNA raises a genuinely interesting philosophical problem for the climbing world. If a route becomes progressively harder as climbers get shorter, and at some point becomes literally impossible for a climber below a certain height, is it fair to assign it a universal grade? The standard grading system assumes that a number represents a fixed difficulty level that any sufficiently trained climber of any body type can aspire to reach. DNA complicates that assumption severely.
"I think every [5.15d] climber would name a different route as the hardest for them," Schubert observed. "Adam would maybe say B.I.G. I would feel like, 'Whoa, Adam, you're crazy. B.I.G. is the easiest for me.' Adam would say for him, Silence is the easiest, for sure." Schubert's observation cuts to the heart of what makes elite climbing grades so contentious and so fascinating. There is no objective metric. There is only a community of athletes comparing notes across routes that most humans will never touch.
Where the Other 5.15ds Stand
The landscape of the world's hardest routes is slowly but meaningfully expanding. Since the grade was first proposed, four more routes of the grade have been proposed: Bouin's DNA in Verdon Gorge, France in 2022, Schubert's B.I.G. in Flatanger in 2023, Duality of Man in Arizona, USA in 2025, and Jorge Díaz-Rullo's Café Colombia in Margalef, Spain in March this year. The inclusion of an American route — Duality of Man in Arizona — is particularly significant for the domestic climbing scene, representing the first time the continental United States has produced a route at the sport's hardest proposed grade.
Schubert has tried every 5.15d except the newest line at the grade, Jorge Díaz-Rullo's Café Colombia. He told reporters that DNA feels harder than his route B.I.G., and could be the hardest route at the grade. That ranking — provisional, personal, contingent on body type — will be debated for years. But the important thing is that it can now be debated in concrete terms rather than in the abstract. With DNA confirmed, the conversation becomes data-driven rather than purely speculative.
Notably, Adam Ondra's Silence — the route that started all of this in 2017 — remains unrepeated. Adam Ondra's Silence has gone unrepeated since the Czech wunderkind made the first ascent in September 2017. He proposed 5.15d for this 150-foot roof line, making it the world's hardest sport climb and first proposed 5.15d. Schubert's confirmation of DNA doesn't definitively settle where Silence sits in the hierarchy, but it does establish a concrete reference point. The next climber to attempt Silence will be able to compare their experience against an actual, confirmed 5.15d rather than against another unverified proposal.
A Man Who Has Run Out of Grades
With the ascent of DNA, Schubert became the first climber to complete two routes with a grade proposal of 5.15d. He made the first ascent of B.I.G. in 2023 before returning to the grade with a repeat of Bouin's route. That double is genuinely unprecedented. It places Schubert in a category not just above every other active climber, but beyond any climber who has ever lived. The closest parallel might be the early days of extreme alpinism, when a handful of climbers in a single generation were rewriting the limits of what was possible faster than anyone could process.
Schubert himself was candid about the emotional weight of the moment. "I'm really happy," Schubert told reporters over the phone the next day. "I would never trade this story for anything." The story he refers to is not just the send — it's everything that came before it. The 30 days on the route across multiple years, the beta modifications required by his height, the nine livestreamed attempts, and the moment of lowering from the wall with the confirmation that 5.15d is real, that it exists in the physical world, that human beings can actually do this.
What comes next for Schubert is an open question. He has now climbed every proposed 5.15d except Café Colombia, and confirmed two of them. The frontier, if there is one, lies somewhere above the current ceiling — a place that even Schubert acknowledged may be years or decades away from anyone approaching. For now, the Austrian climber stands at the top of a sport that has spent nearly a decade wondering whether its hardest grade was real. He answered the question the only way climbing allows: by getting on the rock and doing it.
