Climbing prize may be the last for your winners

High on Mount Lunag Ri, Nepal, Austrian climber David Lama began to worry that he might lose his toes. The cold on the 6,894 meter high mountain was one of the worst he had ever experienced.

Mud, trying to climb the mountain alone in 2018, could have died if he got caught in a storm and suffered severe frostbite, or if he had a fall and injured himself. A rescue would be practically impossible.

But Lama’s toes did not freeze at all, so he continued his climb to the top of the mountain. The image that shows him silhouetted above the pulpit-like rock formation that crowns the mountain is the sort of thing climbers dream of. He said after the climb that he had come very close to his risk tolerance limit. Lama won the Piolet d’Or (Golden Ice Axe), the highest mountaineering prize, for this climb.

But Lama did not attend the Piolet d’Or handover ceremony in Ladek-Zdroj, Poland, in September 2019.

He had died five months earlier in an avalanche while trying to blaze a new route to climb the dangerous Howse Peak in the Canadian Rockies. His two climbing partners, American Jess Roskelley and Austrian Hansjorg Auer, also died in the crash. Auer would also receive a Piolet d’Or in Poland, for a challenging solo climb of Mount Lupghar Sar West (7,157 meters) in Pakistan.

The dissonance between the climbers’ deaths and the celebration of their risky solo climbs raised an uncomfortable question regarding Piolet d’Or: is picking winners, and with it losers, a bad idea in mountaineering?

Elite mountain climbing looks dangerous enough; it is not uncommon for practitioners to die playing the sport. However, does the awarding of rewards not reinforce a culture of attachment to risk in an activity that is already potentially lethal?

Giving the awards to Lama and Auer was like “organizing an alcohol-fueled party for someone who died of cirrhosis,” said Rolando Garibotti, 50, an Argentine-American climber with more than 30 years of experience in the sport, speaking by telephone from Innsbruck , in Austria. Garibotti is one of several top climbers for whom the implications of awarding prizes for climbing are difficult to accept.

“There are a lot of alpine climbs where people are lucky if they manage to escape unscathed,” said Garibotti. “And none of these people, or those climbs, should, in my opinion, qualify for the Piolet d’Or. If we are to create a culture in which fewer top practicing athletes die, there are things that need to change.”

Garibotti’s comment about the deaths of top climbers is not hyperbole. Since 2008, seven Piolet d’Or winners, including Swiss climber Ueli Steck, have died in climbing accidents.

The 2021 Piolet d’Or, the 30th edition of the award, was delivered last weekend at Briançon, a mountaineering hub in France. The event involved glittering trophies, thank-you speeches and standing applause. This year’s award-winning climbs had higher safety margins than Lama or Auer. But the specter persisted.

Christian Trommsdorff, climber and organizer of the Piolet d’Or award, said by telephone from Greece that “risk is not a factor in the selection process” of winners, meaning that climbs considered too risky are not considered for the award. “But that’s part of the game,” he said, referring to the inherent risks of mountaineering.

The Piolet d’Or prize was created in 1992 in France as a collaboration between Montagnes magazine and the Group de Haute Montagne, a mountaineering organization chaired by Trommsdorff.

Even disregarding the risk, there have been debates over the years over how to judge climbing, a process that has a subjective aspect as climbers often discuss issues of “style”, ie how one gets to the top of a mountain. .

The disagreements culminated in 2007, when Slovenian climber Marko Prezelj refused to accept the Piolet d’Or. Later that year, he wrote an article published in the annual edition of the American Alpine Journal in which he argued that the awards encouraged the creation of an environment in which climbers were “encouraged to exceed their abilities, to use performance-enhancing substances, and to take unreasonable risks”.

Therefore, in 2009, Piolet d’Or introduced a new format, in which several climbs were recognized, all announced months before the ceremony. This satisfied many of the more outspoken opponents of the “style” school, but for other climbers, including Garibotti, it still left the fundamental problems of risk untouched.

​​Garibotti knows the danger first hand. According to his calculations, more than 30 people with whom he was a climbing partner died while climbing. Piolet d’Or has twice tried to nominate Garibotti for an award, once in 2006 for a new climbing route in Cerro Torre, Patagonia, and once in 2009 for the first complete crossing of the Cerro Torre massif. But he declined the nomination on both occasions.

Most shocking was the team the jury decided to award in 1998: a group of Russian climbers who had taken their first climb up the west face of Makalu, a peak in the Himalayas, the year before. Two of the expedition’s participants died during the climb. Organizers introduced a new criterion after the negative reactions the award aroused that year, demanding that “the climber return from the climb in full,” according to Trommsdorff.

The problem, in Garibotti’s opinion, is not that prizes encourage climbers to take more risks, but that, by rewarding high-risk climbs, they validate reckless behavior. “If you represent reckless climbs, the result will be more reckless climbs,” he said.

After winning a Piolet d’Or in 2019 with his Slovenian colleagues Ales Cesen and Luka Strazar, British climber Tony Livingstone wrote in a text posted on his website that the award “manipulates my human ego” in troubling ways.

“I already have a little devil perched on my shoulder when I complete an open stage” – a climbing section with little protection and which can result in dangerous falls – “and he’s always whispering that ‘chee, you’re going to take a big fall'” , wrote Livingstone. “I don’t need another little devil to offer me a golden trophy.” He only accepted the award because his climbing buddies insisted.

Of course, for many climbers, danger is an important part of the sport’s attractions.

“We have to recognize that in traditional mountaineering, death is a possibility,” said Reinhold Messner, 77, one of the most honored climbers of the last century. “If that’s not a possibility, then we’re not talking mountaineering. The art of survival is literally that: an art.”

Although in 2010 Messner accepted a Piolet d’Or for his career set, an award created the previous year, he is one of the climbers who dismiss the awards as reductive. In 1988, he turned down an honorary Olympic medal for becoming the first person to scale the planet’s 14-plus peaks.

“I was always against the idea of ​​seeing traditional climbing as competition,” said Messner. “I generally don’t support medals. The career pool award is a show of respect.”