TEN years ago rock climbers were, more often than not, deemed a disreputable bunch. When not confused with mountaineers, they might have conjured up images of hirsute, pot-addled, do-nothing “dudes” living out of vans in picturesque rocky locales. The sort of person a salubrious father shepherding his flock on a hiking holiday would keep out of his offsprings' sight. How things have changed. In March, an impressionable 11-year-old from New York, Ashima Shiraishi (pictured with her coach, Obe Carrion), made headlines after she scaled “Crown of Aragorn” in Hueco Tanks, a famous climbing area in Texas. Crown of Aragorn is a boulder problem: a short, intense route typically no more than a few metres high, letting climbers dispense with fiddly paraphernalia like ropes and harnesses and focus on the hardest individual moves. They bring portable mattresses to cushion their inevitable falls. The moves required on Crown of Aragorn are very hard indeed. It is graded V13 on an open-ended scale, which spanned V0 to V14 when the problem was established in 1996 by Frederic Nicole, a burly Swiss climber. These days, the range extends to V16. Miss Shiraishi is only the third woman ever to climb a V13. She is by far the youngest, and smallest, to do so. (Three more women have completed V13s that were subsequently dropped down a notch, after others deemed them soft for the grade.) The young New Yorker may be rock climbing's equivalent of Mozart. But she typifies a trend. As climbing has grown respectable—a change that can be attributed to a number of things, from a fad for all things outdoor to a proliferation of safe indoor climbing gyms—it has attracted talented young athletes who would once have gone into mainstream disciplines like gymnastics or track and field. This in turn has led to unprecedented leaps in performance.

Jerome Meyer, who won the overall bouldering World Cup in 2006, says that the difficulty of the finals of World Cup events (where participants compete to climb an artificially set route on a wall) has jumped from an average of V8 in the early 2000s to V10 now. Adam Pustelnik, who sets routes for roped World Cup competitions, sees a similar trend. As the number of climbers capable of scaling such difficulties rises, competition is becoming fierce. Today, he says, just making the finals, where six climbers face off, is a huge achievement.

In the United States the number of registered competitors has grown from 2,244 in the 2007-08 season to 2,419 in the current one, according to Kynan Waggoner of USA Climbing, the sport's national body. The number of registered coaches and route-setters has doubled in the same period, from 107 to 215 and from 76 to 140.

It is the same story outdoors. In 1998 the top-ranked boulderer on 8a, a website which rates outdoor performance on the basis of the hardest ten climbs a person has completed in the previous year, notched up fewer than 10,000 points. Adam Ondra, the 19-year-old Czech who currently tops the table, has scored almost 12,000 in the past 12 months.

Even that underestimates the scale of the phenomenon. Jens Larssen, who runs 8a, points out that when he set up the site 14 years ago, the top climbers would do perhaps ten really difficult climbs a year. These days, the best do dozens, a development not captured in 8a's coarse ranking. Moreover, many of the climbs that plumped up the highest scores have since been downgraded, but the scores themselves have not been recalculated. If they were, Mr Larssen suspects, the discrepancy between the 1990s and now would be even greater.

Where performance has led, cash has followed. In 2008, when the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) took charge of World Cups and World Championships from the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation, the winner of a World Cup event could hope to bring home €2,535 ($3,190). This season, they earn €3,050 for finishing first.

Sponsors, too, have become increasingly generous, drawn in part by swelling audiences. In 2007 the biennial World Championships drew 17,500 spectators to Aviles, in Spain. In 2009 a whopping 65,000 aficionados descended on China's Qinghai. Last year the contest in Arco, Italy, attracted a more modest though still-impressive crowd of 35,000.

Adam Chamberlain, the head of marketing at Black Diamond Equipment, says that the American gear-maker went from supporting a couple of sport climbers five years ago to a dozen now. Besides kit, its athletes can count on a stipend, a travel budget, and cash incentives for appearing on magazine covers and in features. All have grown in recent years. With companies vying for talented individuals to sport their logos, Mr Chamberlain predicts, his firm may need to begin matching cash prizes they win at competitions, a practice common in well-established disciplines such as freestyle skiing, to retain the best.

In Austria, a country where climbing is so prominent that results of competitions regularly make the front page of national newspapers, sponsors include Raiffaisen, a big bank, and Lenzing, an industrial concern. The Austrian army, too, lends its support. Such “non-endemic” sponsors have yet to make a mark in the America, but Mr Waggoner hopes this might change soon.

Many will no doubt pile in if climbing fulfils its Olympic aspirations. Mr Meyer, who now holds a senior position at the IFSC, is lobbying the International Olympic Committee to introduce climbing as a fully-fledged discipline. A decision is due next year on whether the sport will debut at the 2020 games. If it does, Miss Shiraishi, who will have turned 19 by then, looks like a strong contender for that first Olympic gold.