In traditional mountain climbing and rock climbing, bolts are sometimes driven into a section of rock face that's difficult or impossible to climb because it's bare of natural hand holds.

 During the 1970s, climbers in France began the practice of placing bolts all the way up a difficult surface, allowing a climber to scale it more easily by clipping lines to the bolts instead of relying on traditional mountain climbing gear.

A more and more surfaces were bolted; it occurred to someone that climbing could become a competitive sport, since climbers could be timed on their ascents over a given route. Exactly when and where that happened isn't known.

Competitive sport climbing is now usually done on a climbing wall built especially for that purpose. There are two types of competition, speed and difficulty.

In the speed event, two climbers go up the wall side by side on separate but identical routes and the first to touch a buzzer at the top of the wall is the winner. Competition continues, tournament style, until only a single winner remains.

In the difficulty event, climbers have a choice of paths with varying difficulty. A climb is scored on a combination of the height reached in a given period of time and the difficulty of the path chosen.

In the X Games, speed climbing is done on a 60-foot, vertical wall. The difficulty climb uses a 40-foot wall with a 20-foot overhang.

Bouldering is a recent offshoot. Originally, climbers worked on boulders to practice a particular move, and bouldering has now become a discipline in itself. As the name suggests, the sport involves climbing a single large rock with no ropes or other mechanical aids.

Yet another offshoot is ice climbing, which began in the early 1990s and became a world championship discipline in 2002.

On the international level, the climbing sports are governed by the International Council for Competition Climbing, an affiliate of The “Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinism”. USA Climbing is the national governing body.