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Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Big Idea: CASE STUDY #2: Defying Death for Fun & Profit
Risk Management


	The Danger Boy in Canmore

ONE OF GADD'S favorite ways to do business is over a plate of huevos rancheros at Canmore's Summit Cafe, the financial section of the Calgary Herald spread out before him, a large coffee in his grasp.

He owns two companies: Gravsports Inc. and WG Sports Research Inc. The first is his channel for product endorsements, prize money from climbing competitions, and story fees for first-person articles and opinion pieces he writes for magazines like Rock & Ice. The other is a white-collar endeavor through which companies like Nike and Simms pay Gadd consulting fees.

Gadd has also been instrumental in expanding the adventure marketplace: In the late 1990s he helped transform the small-time sport of mixed climbing into the fairly hot commodity it is today, largely through his own radical climbs on previously unthinkable routes and his subsequent hectoring of gearmakers to hop aboard with new products.

Based on the style used by climbers for a century to ascend ice-covered peaks with ice axes, modern mixed climbing is much more dangerous. Mixed climbers use their axes to climb inverted frozen waterfalls—with their huge, potentially deadly ice stalactites—and the often crumbly rock surrounding them. To do it right, you need the skill, nerve, and strength of a conventional ice climber and the gymnastic agility of a sport climber.

Back in 1995, you couldn't buy mixed- climbing-specific equipment and apparel. These days,

Gadd is a cutting-edge adventurer with a head for business, selling himself with the same intensity he throws at a wall. "He's like a little CEO," says former Climbing editor Michael Kennedy. "And of course it rubs people the wrong way. They get incensed."

companies like Grivel, Charlet Moser, and Black Diamond devote product lines to the fast-growing sport, which Gadd has dominated. His participation brought credibility to the X Games ice-climbing competition, a mixed-climbing event, and the Ice Climbing World Cup, a five-event mixed-climbing series held in Europe, which he won during the inaugural 2000 season.

Gadd's success has a downside: He's become something of a target for fellow athletes who see him as a crass self-promoter who has robbed mixed climbing of its early purity. Climber Mark Twight is fond of Gadd, but has publicly lambasted him for helping hype the X Games (Twight finds them tasteless) and for drilling bolts for added protection on mixed routes that would otherwise be too dangerous to attempt. "It's like climbing Everest with oxygen," snorts Twight. And while modern climbers are realistic about the need to earn a living, Gadd's style is resented—some see him as a money-grubber.

"Most people land an endorsement deal and then basically just climb," says Michael Kennedy, former publisher and editor of Climbing magazine, where Gadd worked briefly as an intern in 1989. "Will approaches sponsorship like a little CEO, spending a great deal of time scheming ways that he can add value for his sponsor, market himself better, and do endless hours of promotional work. The result is a sort of media-driven, commercial brand of climbing. And of course it rubs people the wrong way. They get incensed."

"He's the most competitive person alive," says Gadd's younger brother, Toby, 32, a recreational climber who for several years barely spoke to Will after spending his youth serving as big bro's personal punching bag. "He's great at psychological warfare, too. If he gets too old to do what he's doing now, the business world better look out."

He's also a hothead, says Stevie Haston, a British climber and Gadd's archrival in mixed climbing. Gadd and Haston have had a few heated public exchanges that, Haston says, "occasionally" got physical. "One of the things that's not so pleasant about him is that he gets right in your face, shouts at judges, and swears at them."

Gadd is unfazed. He admits to behaving poorly at a World Cup event a few years ago, barking at a judge and almost getting in a fistfight. But he shrugs off Haston's comments as the rants of an unstable mind—"Reality has never been an impediment in Stevie's world"—and he has no time for people who think their way of pursuing adventure is morally superior. In a recent article in the American Alpine Journal, Gadd wrote: "Those who deride media-supported climbing trips are usually either jealous or trying to stay true to some sort of historical myth that climbing didn't used to be commercial."

"Climbing is exploration," he concluded. "Exploration costs money." Everest expeditioners George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, he'll remind you, didn't go to the Himalayas on money they made waiting tables. Instead they sold stories to newspapers back home.

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