When she was 16, Olivia Hsu was hanging out on the campus where her father was a professor. This was at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She remembers an exchange student approaching, seeking to chat her up.
“There was a Canadian guy, and he was like, ‘Oh, you want to go rock climbing?’ Because there's climbing in Hong Kong. And he was into climbing and he asked me if I wanted to go,” Olivia says today from her home in Boulder, Colorado.
“I was like, 'I don't know if I'd like that. No, I don’t think so.’”
Little did she know that in just a couple of years, while attending college in Australia, she would find herself at a climbing club, looking for something new to try. At that first visit, the self-described “skinny girl who couldn’t do a single pull-up” announced her arrival by successfully completing a 5.10, which most of the more experienced men in attendance couldn’t do.
“I think it was this realization of, ‘Wow. I'm better than these guys and they're way stronger than me.’ And I think what's kind of interesting with climbing is that it’s probably the only sport that women are just a fraction away from the top male competitor.”
Olivia has been a few places. Born in Northern California, her family later moved to the lower, warmer half of the state. Then it was Hong Kong. And, as noted, for college she chose Australia, where she studied economics and history, and later pursued a master’s degree in law. Of Taiwanese descent, she wasn’t exposed to the sporting life much as a young girl.
“My parents were not into me playing sports and doing things like that,” she says. “So it's kind of funny because I'm a parent now, right? So I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm going to sign my kid up for these sports or take him skiing or whatever. But, I had none of that growing up.”
Her son, Walker, won’t need to worry about his athlete genes. While mom is a professional climber, dad Botsy Phillips is a former ski racer and national champion mountain biker.
For Olivia, though, a future as a renowned climber where she would grace dozens of magazine spreads wasn’t something she aspired to. She was on an academic path to become a lawyer, with a white-collar future waiting for her.
“I think as I progressed in my legal studies, I was also becoming more involved in climbing as well. And I think there was a part of the legal profession that really was not that attractive to me,” she says. "I remember one summer I had classmates who basically spent the whole summer being a legal clerk, you know, just doing all the small tasks for lawyers.
“And, I was like, ‘I'm going rock climbing.’ So I went to Europe and climbed for three months. And, they all thought I was nuts and they couldn't believe it, like, ‘Oh, why wouldn't you want to spend your whole summer photocopying?’”
Olivia says Europe has always been at the forefront of difficult sport climbing. This not only pushed her abilities, she was able to sample different genres of the sport as well. She learned so much, and improved at such an incredible pace, she began to make a name for herself.
“I love every form of climbing because there's always something you can learn from each style. And I think I've always been under the mindset of the more rock or the more different styles you can climb on than the more skills or bag of tricks you have to draw from,” she says.
As sponsors started approaching her, I wondered if that changed her focus. Climbing was her new happy place. When it becomes a business relationship, what changes?
“People want to get sponsored, but then sometimes it's like the sponsorship obligation is such that, it’s not the death of your climbing, but, there's a balance between being able to climb and then having these obligations.
“I wasn't seeking it out. I was just climbing all the time. And there'd be photographers and they would take some photos of me and then I would end up in a Patagonia ad. For me, it was more just the ability to climb more, so you have more funding or people who are going to pay for trips and things like that.”
Way back in Australia, when Olivia began to turn her nose at the idea of a career in law — when she discovered climbing and fell head over heels for it — the new obsession wrought her first injury. And she wondered, “what do I do with my time?”
“This friend of mine was like, ‘I heard this thing called yoga could maybe be good for climbing.’”
Without Google, without a dearth of yoga-themed magazines, Olivia wasn’t sure what she walking in to.
“It happened to be Ashtanga, which is what I still practice today. Back then there wasn't like core power and all these other types of yoga, there was just the more traditional forms. So I just stumbled upon it and thought it was amazing.”
She began to pursue parallel passions. Climbing and yoga suited her needs, and as she grew out of her twenties and into her thirties, she considered making a rather large life change. The United States beckoned. She chose Boulder, Colorado, as her new home, mainly for the climbing scene. Yet when she arrived, there was an unexpected bonus.
A man named Richard Freeman was a leading Ashtanga teacher. He was based in Boulder, and Olivia was able to learn from him. Fast forward, and her present-day life is taking shape. She bought a home from the man she would later marry, and near the end of the pandemic Olivia opened a yoga studio.
She continued to climb until she was 36 weeks pregnant, although she admits, “I wasn’t sending the hardest routes.” Now, at 48, she runs three parallel tracks — climbing, yoga and family — and continues to receive the support of her sponsors.
“It's such a lifestyle sport that a lot of my sponsors were like, ‘It's amazing you’re a mom and it's amazing you still get out climbing and we still want to support you because that's really inspiring to a lot of other people who want to have a family.
“So I feel like with climbing, it's also this thing where when it first started, it was this obscure thing, like people who probably didn't really fit into society did it,” she says. “And now it's really mainstream. People come up to me, just random people who are like, ‘Oh my god, you know what? I saw you climbing and you were pregnant or you were climbing and you had your infant at the crag. And we decided to have a kid because you guys are still doing it.”
For all she has accomplished as a professional climber, a yoga instructor and studio owner, a mother and wife, and a role model, she finds a certain serendipity in her journey. She says her younger self wouldn’t have seen it happen this way, but she’s glad it did.
“It's kind of funny how you find something that you're just so passionate about. And I just feel like I've been really lucky to have been able to fulfill that. It's like, you realize a lot of things in life that maybe you don't think about as much and when you have a kid, it kind of pushes all the shit in front.
“I remember when I was pregnant, one of my yoga teachers, she said to me, ‘You know what? You'll be fine. It's not like you did anything cool in your life.’ I think what she meant was when you do things and your cup is really full, you have this thing you're really passionate about doing, and then you have this other demanding thing that you're really passionate about, too. So it's kind of like this divide between your time. And I feel like with my life and with climbing and stuff that like, I’ve really filled my cup. So then, to have a kid, I don't feel like I'm losing out on anything.”
The satisfaction that comes with success, with parenting, with exceeding your dreams — that can get lost in the bustle of life. We all need moments where we can step back and appreciate what we’ve earned.
Sometimes, that acknowledgement comes in curious ways, like a random email from someone you haven’t seen in years. Say, a Canadian exchange student you met decades ago in Hong Kong. Maybe this person sees you not as the 16-year-old daughter of a professor, but as a bad-ass climber gracing the cover of Rock and Ice magazine, and he decides to write you.
“I got this email from him, and he had attached a photo of the magazine cover. And all he wrote was, ‘So I thought you didn't think you'd like climbing?’”
Matthew Fults is author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novel, The Scotland Project, available from your favorite bookseller.
