Sport climbing at Paris 2024 Olympic Games: Who are Team GB climbers Hamish McArthur and Toby Roberts?

The sport climbing events at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games have been reformatted, and Team GB stand a strong chance of taking away a medal in the boulder and lead event when the men's final kicks off. Young climbers Toby Roberts and Hamish McArthur both advanced, making Great Britain the only team to have two climbers in the final.

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Team GB have a strong chance of taking a podium place in the men's boulder and lead final at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Toby Roberts and Hamish McArthur ranked second and eighth respectively in the semi-final on Wednesday, advancing to the final.

Team GB are the only nation to have two entrants in the final, and represents a huge improvement in their showing in the sport after entering just one athlete in the last Games in Tokyo, where sport climbing made its Olympic debut.

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HOW DOES BOULDER & LEAD WORK?

Paris 2024 has revamped climbing with two golds now on offer.

One is for speed, where climbers ascend with spiderman-like athleticism as quick as they possibly can.

The second is split into two disciplines – boulder and lead – where points in the two events are combined into a total tally.

Boulder: Athletes climb a 4.5m wall without ropes within a time period and in as few attempts possible.

Lead: Climbers ascend a 15m wall as high as they can go in six minutes in a single attempt.

WHO are TOBY ROBERTS AND HAMISH MCARTHUR?

The climbing duo performed strongly to book their places in the men's boulder and lead final at Paris 2024, becoming the first men to represent Team GB in sport climbing competition at the Olympics in the process.

Climbing prodigy Toby Roberts, 19, was the first British male climber to qualify for climbing at the Games. The Surrey-born climber won gold in the Italian portion of the 2023 Climbing World Cup, ranking fourth in the entire competition.

He also won a lead World Cup in the home of climbing, Chamonix.

A then 18-year-old Roberts celebrated the gold with his first pint of beer, which he called "pretty disappointing,” and clearly paled in comparison to the addictiveness of climbing.

Roberts finished second in the semi-finals in Paris on Wednesday, scoring 54.1 points in the boulder section and 68.1 in the lead for a total of 122.2 – second to Japan's Sorato Anraku.

From York, Hamish McArthur finished eighth in the semi-final with 34.2 in the boulder and 45.1 in the lead for a total of 79.3. The 23-year-old was over 10 points ahead of his closest competitor.

McArthur's journey to the Olympics began 18 years ago, when at five years old, his parents lied about his age to get him into the local climbing gym.

“I was five and you had to be six or seven to book on the course but out of desperation my parents wanted me to channel my energy into a safer environment where I wasn't going to break any limbs from falling out of trees," he said.

McArthur announced himself to the climbing world by winning the junior world championships in 2021, and finished on the podium in the Senior World Championships lead competition a month later.

Since then, he has steadily worked his way up the rankings and qualified for Paris earlier this year.