Abstract: Under the background of sport climbing being accepted as an event of the Olympic Games, the Youth Olympic Games, the Asian Games and the National Games in 2016-2017, this present paper explores, by means of mathematical statistics and comparative analysis, the current world sport climbing competition pattern with reference to the origin and development of sport climbing and sport climbing competition results in World Championships. The results show that: (1) the overall competitive strength of sport climbing is unequally distributed in different regions, with Europe taking obvious advantage, Asia rising rapidly, and the Americas slowly increasing in individual disciplines, presenting a diversified competition pattern. (2) Currently, the overall competition pattern can be divided into four groups: Russia and France are taking the lead in terms of overall competitive strength; Slovenia and Japan are more prominent in some disciplines; Switzerland, Spain and China are in the third group. The remaining countries that have not achieved any breakthrough of medals and have great development potential are collectively referred to as the fourth group. (3) Although China has made great progress in competitive strength of sport climbing in recent years, it has still a certain gap with the international sport climbing powers. Suggestions: Carefully analyze the current international climbing competition pattern, strengthen the understanding of international competition rules, strengthen international exchanges, pay attention to the construction of reserve echelon, rationalize the team structure, improve the competition mechanism so as to promote the improvement of China's competitive strength.

Key words: 2020 Tokyo Olympics, sport climbing, competition pattern, development strategy