A misleading safety standard for belay devices

When an article endorsing a certain category of products is accompanied by adverts for a particular brand from that same category, my alarm bells begin to chime. 

In a recent article in the German online magazine Climbing.de it is brought to attention that the association of German climbing gyms, KLEVER now recommends the use of a certain type of belay devices, namely semi-automatic devices (like Petzl Gri-Gri) and auto tubes (like Mammut Smart), over regular tubular devices (like Black Diamond ATC). That article is based on another article from KLEVER's own website. 

Below I will discuss KLEVER’s data and make my own conclusions.

Petzl Grigri
a semi-automatic belay device

Mammut Smart
an auto tube belay device

Black Diamond ATC
a tube type belay device

In 2013 German climbing gyms had a total of 1,035,505 visits where of 236 (or 0.02%) led to accidents of varying seriousness. This is equivalent to 0,076 accidents per 1000 hours of climbing. In comparison, professional football has 9.4 accidents per 1000 hours of playing football. It can be concluded that professional football is associated with far more accidents than climbing in a climbing gym. So far so good. 

Of the 236 accidents recorded 145 (61%) were accidents related to bouldering and 29 (12%) were related to the belayer, and 35 (15%) were related to the climber. This could lead one to believe that bouldering is more risky than lead climbing, but this would be a misconception. For that we need information on how many of the climbing visits included bouldering. 

Of the 29 accidents, which were related to the belayer, 18 accidents (62%) involved a tubular belay device, 2 accidents (7%) involved an auto tube and 5 accidents (17%) involved a semi-automatic belay device while unknown belay devices were used in 2 accidents. Here comes the misconception of KLEVER, as they believe that tubular belay devices are more risky than the other two types of belay device. Again, we need information on how many of the climbing visits, which involved lead climbing, plus we need information on the climbers belay devices. With these data missing, one can not recommend a specific type of brake over another. Not very clever !!

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