Fred Rouhling (born 24 January 1970) is a French rock climber and boulderer, noted for creating and repeating some of the earliest grade sport climbing routes in the world, including Hugh in 1993, the first-ever French sport route. Rouhling is also known for the controversy from his proposed grading of for his 1995 route , which would have made it the world's first-ever 9b-graded sport route; 25 years later, it was graded at . Early life Rouhling grew up in the small French farming town of Le Panissaud. His neighboring village of Vilhonneur has a limestone quarry (which supplied materials for the Statue of Liberty). Twenty minutes away is the larger town of Angoulême, where limestone crags overhang many of the roads, with the best-known being Les Eaux Claires ("The Clear Waters"), with 15 to 20-metre overhanging extreme routes that require strong fingers to manage the small pockets used to ascend them; and contains nationally-regarded extreme routes such as La Crépinette (1983), France's first . Rouhling began to climb in school, and by age 19 was climbing at when the world's hardest routes were then at . Climbing career Hugh, first 9a in France In the early 1990s, Rouhling had moved to the south of France for college where he also had access to the leading sport climbing venues of France. Rouhling made the first ascent of UFO, the first in the Calanaques, and then completed Les Spécialistes Direct at the Verdon Gorge. Les Spécialistes Direct was a variation on Jean-Baptiste Tribout's famous 1987 route, Les Spécialistes, which was bolted earlier by Alain Robert; with the downgrade of Les Spécialistes to 8b+, Rouhling's ascent remains the first 8c route in the gorge. Returning home in 1993, Rouhling wanted to create different routes from the long steep stamina crimpy routes of the Calanques and Verdon. At his local crag of Eaux-Clairs, he freed a line he called Hugh with a double-overhanging bulge that required little footwork. Having climbed it, he made the route harder by filling in holds and chipping-out new ones that he graded at . At the time, there were only three known 9a routes in the world. Hugh was repeated in 2001, and by Dai Koyamada (2002), and Sébastien Bouin (2020), confirming the grade of 9a, the first 9a in France. The use of chipping to create new extreme routes was not uncommon then in France, and included