JLL backs star climber’s Olympic bid

JLL has teamed up with Australia’s youngest Olympic hopeful in the global sporting event’s newest discipline.

Angie Scarth-Johnson in training for the new Olympic sport of climbing. Picture: James Gourley

Real estate professional services firm JLL has struck a unique sponsorship agreement with one of Australia’s youngest Olympic hopes in the global sporting event’s newest discipline, which will include the use of cutting-edge technology.

JLL is sponsoring 15-year-old Angie Scarth-Johnson, who is hoping to secure a spot at next year’s Tokyo Olympics in the sport of climbing, which is making its debut as an Olympic sport divided into three separate disciplines: speed climbing, lead climbing and bouldering.

As part of the deal, JLL has commissioned the creation of a motion-capture climbing suit for Scarth-Johnson, which uses advanced sensor fusion technology to analyse a climber’s movements and turn it into kinematic or motion and movement data.

The chief executive of the Australian arm of JLL, Stephen Conry, said the deal was as a result of his company looking for a different style of sponsorship rather than a large football club or sporting code, and one that could mix innovation with the built environment such as urban landscapes, buildings and parks that the firm’s clients operate in.

“Rockclimbing has a kind of relatability to scaling up vertical surface, such as rock faces or more specifically walls of buildings,” Mr Conry said. “In the case of Angie, she possesses such extraordinary ambition and commitment for someone so young. We often get involved in worthwhile community initiatives and causes so we’re thrilled to get behind her.”

Only 40 athletes will compete in climbing in Tokyo, across both men and women, meaning competition for qualification will be tough. Scarth-Johnson has been climbing since the age of seven and at nine became the youngest person in the world to complete a complex Grade 31 climb.

JLL is also funding the employment of British coach Ian Dunn, a climbing expert who says the sensor suit is the first piece of technology he has seen that addresses the needs of elite climbers.

“With this technology, hundreds of thousands of kinematic data points are captured for each climb and used to recreate their climb virtually in an online 3D software,” Mr Dunn said.

The smart suit format is designed to be mobile and makes it easy for athletes like Scarth-Johnson to bring the suit along to any training location.

Scarth-Johnson will train with a motion-capture system featuring technology that turns any climbing wall into a ‘smart’ one able to be read and analysed via 16 high-performance motion tracking sensors tracking her movements. The data is processed and visualised into a dynamic 360-degree action replay.

JLL’s head of marketing in Australia, Craig McCarthy, said the idea for the deal started with a discussion with a brand manager about taking up a sponsorship in sport, something JLL rarely does.

Mr McCarthy said he thought “about our business in Australia in the context of how we live, work and play and the contrast between our natural environment and the diverse built environment”.

“I then made the connection between sport and our urban spaces and suggested rock-climbing.

“We knew the sport was popular, it straddled the urban environment and it was different,” he said.