Dai Koyamada (, born 23 August 1976) is a Japanese rock climber and known as one of the leading boulderers of his generation who established some of the first-ever boulder problems at. He has also established and repeated, some of the hardest sport climbs in the world.

Early life

Dai was born on 23 August 1976 in Kagoshima Prefecture and started climbing in 1993.

Climbing career

Competition climbing

In 1996, Koyamada won the Japanese National Championship. This is the event that allowed him to become a professional rock climber. Four years later in 2000 Koyamada left the competition climbing circuit because he realized "The real nature of my climbing resides in crags".

Rock climbing

Koyamada came to wider prominence in sport climbing when in 2001, he completed the first ascent (FA) of Logical Progression, a sport climb in Joyama, Japan, which was considered one of the most difficult in the world at the time. In 2004, Koyamada came to international prominence when he travelled to the Hollow Mountain Cave in the Grampians National Park in Australia, and created several new extreme bouldering routes that were considered to be amongst the world's first-ever at the grade, most notably Sleepy Rave, and The Wheel of Life. Both have seen their grades softened to and respectively. Later in 2004, Koyamada traveled to Switzerland and repeated Fred Nicole's Dreamtime on November 9, then one of the hardest boulder problems in the world, and one of the first boulders to receive a. On October 15, 2005, Koyamada repeated the famous sport climbing route, Action Directe, in the Frankenjura, Germany and proclaimed it harder than any other route that he has climbed. In a 2017 interview, Koymada called his ascent of Action Directe as "the outstanding turning point in my climbing career". On April 4, 2017, at the age of 40, Koyamada climbed a new personal best with the first ascent of the boulder, Nayuta in Gero, Japan.

Notable ascents

Boulder problems

Redpointed routes