Oceana Mackenzie is Australia’s best sport climber, and in career-best form heading into the Paris Olympics. She travels the world with friends and family, exploring foreign countries and experiencing new cultures. Barely out of her teens, she reads feminist literature, devours books about diversity and inclusion, and is a committed vegan partly for the betterment of the planet. And the Melburnian is in extraordinary physical condition, pursuing her passion every day.
The pieces seem to be fitting together for the 21-year-old, but Mackenzie is honest: life’s puzzle is far from complete. “There’s no point doing it if it’s not fun,” she says on a Zoom call, as her build-up to Paris continues. “It’s something I’m struggling a little bit with at the moment.”
Sport climbing is preparing for its second appearance at an Olympics at the Paris Games. Mackenzie competed at Tokyo and finished 19th out of 20 athletes. Of the event’s three disciplines, bouldering was her best, where she finished 12th. It was a sensational achievement for someone still in their teens.
But looking back, the Australian knows she wasn’t at her peak. “I wasn’t really enjoying training very much and I wasn’t enjoying comps very much because I just had too much pressure on myself and I was climbing for results,” she says. “And so I put in a lot of work two pre-seasons ago, to really just to build up my confidence and enjoy what I was doing.”
Mackenzie is open about life as an elite athlete in a sport that demands much. She says she needs to repeatedly “check in” with herself. “Ultimately I want to be climbing for a long time and climbing my best for a long time.” Finding the balance, she has learned, can be hard. “I’m quite determined, and I can be quite hard on myself, especially in training. I can take it a little too seriously sometimes.”
Born in Germany, she moved as a baby with her five elder sisters to Queensland before settling in Melbourne. Although Oceania is on her birth certificate, her parents decided they preferred Oceana, without the “i”. Both are commonly used. “I’m really chill about it, but all of my friends and everything call me Oce,” she says, using the pronunciation “oh-sh”. She now has four nieces (but still no boys across two generations) and family and climbing have become intertwined: one of her sisters is dating her coach.
Having competed in international competitions since 2016, Mackenzie has largely outgrown the challenge of the routes and holds of the climbing gyms in Australia. But as natural as time with the wall has become, Mackenzie is aware it is not always a good thing. “As soon as I find a weakness of mine, or something I want to work on, I do it repetitively for a long time until I perfect it, which can kind of become almost like an obsession,” she says. “And not a healthy ‘work on your weaknesses’ kind of way. Sometimes that can lead to me being a bit grumpy and overtraining.”
The decision made for Paris to split its sport climbing competition into two disciplines – of speed climbing in one, and bouldering and lead climbing in the other – benefits the Australian. She competes regularly at lead climbing, where athletes find a way up a 15-metre wall supported by a rope. But her speciality is bouldering, which prioritises problem-solving as much as power and precision. She recorded her best World Cup result last month, finishing fourth in Salt Lake City.
“It is quite unique that in an individual sport, there is so much strategy,” she says. “It goes down to even strategising your timing when you’re out on the mat staring around, how many attempts you will have on the wall in a certain amount of time, and then it even goes deeper than that.”
The style or layout of the “boulder” – made up of grips or hold spaced out along the wall – will determine how many attempts might be possible. The combination might present multiple solutions, placing hands or feet in different positions, often leading to failure. “Do you try that method again, or do you try something else?,” she says, admitting it’s an area she wants to improve.
But Mackenzie’s critical approach extends beyond the climbing wall. She says she finds herself compelled to ask how the world is organised, and who it has been organised by, and finds even parts of climbing hard to accept.
She says there should be more women who do “route setting” – determining the suggested route – in a sport whose community is largely made up of Europeans and North Americans. “It would be nice to get more diversity in climbing,” she says. “Everyone usually looks pretty similar when at World Cups and things like that, so the long-term goal would be to work out how to get more diverse people involved in climbing, and work out why they’re not there.”
Climbing has recently been forced to reflect on its own culture. Olympic champion Janja Garnbret spoke out last year about eating disorders in a sport focused on physical conditioning. “A lot of the time people emphasise a lot on the weight, not so much the strength,” Mackenzie says. “Something that every climber say battles with is knowing the best balance.”
She is currently fuelling as much as she can as part of pre-Olympics endurance training, but she says her diet is not always straightforward. “It’s definitely something that I’ve struggled with in the past and will probably continue to struggle with for my whole career, when you’re trying to be as small as possible and perform as well,” she says. “You are definitely not as happy in everyday life and you can’t really enjoy it as much with your friends and family.”
It’s not the only puzzle for Mackenzie, who describes herself as an introvert who is still learning to prioritise herself on the busy global circuit. Colouring in, listening to music and reading have become a way for her to recharge, as she prepares for Paris.“I’m also trying to go in with it just being another competition,” she says. “I get to just climb and express myself.”
