By Michael Breen
Did she or didn’t she? The dispute over whether the mountaineer Oh Eun-sun lied when she claimed to have reached the summit of Mt. Kangchenjunga in the Himalayas last year has gripped the international climbing community and risks further sullying the reputation of Koreans for cheating.
Oh is unquestionably one of the greatest climbers of modern time. With her ascent of Annapurna in April, the 44-year-old became the first woman and the latest of just 21 mountaineers to have stood atop all of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000 meters.
Last year, she was still five peaks short of the milestone and four other women climbers were ahead. But she ended the year with just one to go, a phenomenal achievement which led one commentator to refer to her as the Usain Bolt of high altitude climbing.
Mountaineering is considered an honorable sport that tends to pit individuals or small teams against their own limits. But first ascents, new routes, and ascents of difficult peaks are prized and occasionally disputes arise. The 2000 ascent of Everest by a climber named Byron Smith, for example, is listed as ``disputed” due to ascent and descent times and to the lack of photographic evidence even though Smith and his team of Sherpas were carrying cameras.
Just last month fellow climbers have questioned the claim of speed climber Christian Stangl to have reached the top of K2. For 50 years, Cesare Maestri has insisted that he and teammate Toni Egger climbed the 3,128-meter Cerro Torre, a pinnacle of ice and granite in Patagonia that has been called the hardest mountain in the world. Most experts, however, consider the climb a hoax. Egger who was carrying the camera, was swept off the face by an avalanche during the descent and along with him the camera and evidence.
In recent years, guided ascents of Mt. Everest and others among the world’s highest mountains, have become big business and led to a new type of ethical dispute. Oh herself has been criticized for failing to come to the aid of a Spanish climber who died on Annapurna while waiting for rescue.
The dispute over Oh’s 2009 ascent of Kangchenjunga began with the summit photograph. The only visible evidence of her ascent, the photo is blurred but clear enough to show her apparently standing on bare rock, not on the snow which features in the summit photo of her main rival, Edurne Pasaban, who had hoped to become first woman to climb all 14 eight-thousanders.
Pasaban’s doubts about Oh’s ascent lead Elizabeth Hawley, a Kathmandu-based unofficial authority on mountain ascents, to register the climb in her Himalayan Database as ``disputed.” Hawley pointed to the rock in the photo. In addition, she said, two of the three Sherpas with Oh claimed she did not reach the summit. This week, one of the two, according to this newspaper, changed his story, which still means that one is either mistaken or lying.
The Nepalese government and the Nepal Mountaineering Association, on the other hand, recognize Oh’s achievement and the websites 8000ers.com and ExplorersWeb credit her with having climbed Kanchenjunga.
In Korea, however, most damaging of all has been a ruling by the Korea Alpine Federation that there was not enough evidence to confirm Oh’s claim to have scaled Kanchenjunga on the Nepal-Tibet border.
Any attempt by outside commentators to draw conclusions is futile but we may note the Korean context of this dispute that unfortunately leans Koreans to doubt a high achiever like Oh. In Korea, being first carries huge rewards while being second may mean nothing. Young male ballet dancers, to take a random unrelated example, may be exempted from military service not because they are highly talented but only if they win a gold medal in an international competition.
Pressures of this sort in which the benefits of appearing to achieve outweigh the personal satisfaction of actually achieving create an environment conducive to cheating. As this is not likely to change any time soon, the solution is to strike the cheats from the record books and let them go the way of the stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk or the sprinter Ben Johnson and take no interest in their efforts to recover their reputation.
If, on the other hand, Oh’s ascent is confirmed, her rivals, the Korean Alpine Federation, and the press all owe her a huge apology.
Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.
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