In December 2018, the media tuned in to a dramatic adventure story: Colin O’Brady, a 33-year-old American, was vying to achieve what he called “The Impossible First,” the first “solo, unsupported, unassisted” crossing of Antarctica. The fact that another guy was simultaneously trying to do the same thing via the same route raised the stakes and created the perfect made-for-mainstream adventure drama.
Ultimately, O’Brady finished two days before his competition and declared himself, in a post on Instagram, “the first person in history to traverse the continent of Antarctica coast to coast solo, unsupported and unaided.” He went on to enjoy all of the usual acclaim and media appearances that we’re now accustomed to seeing from today’s brand of adventurer, from magazine covers and TEDx talks to the lucrative world of corporate speaking gigs and glib appearances alongside the idiot hosts of Morning Shows.
Damien Gildea, an expert on Antarctic adventure, called bullshit on O’Brady within days, and subsequently wrote a lengthy, meticulously detailed, and well-researched piece for Explorer’s Web that essentially served O’Brady a healthy helping of Kendrick Lamar’s wonderful epigram, “Sit down, lil’ bitch. Be Humble.”
What O’Brady had achieved, impressive as it may be, could hardly be called unsupported, given that he followed a plowed road for much of his adventure, nor could it even be called a “first” given that Borge Ousland had already done something far more impressive in 1997, nor was it even “coast to coast” by every accepted definition of that word. O’Brady failed to mention these details, however, but many of the details he did reveal also “don’t stand up to scrutiny,” as Aaron Teasdale delicately put it in a new 7,000-word story for National Geographic that thoroughly lays waste to O’Brady’s reputation and perhaps career.
There’s no need to expend any more words describing all of the context-free embellishments and self-serving omissions committed by O’Brady—but you should definitely read Teasdale and Gildea’s stories to understand the scope of his numerous peccadillos, which, all together add up to something far more offensive. It is important to understand that it’s the cumulative nature of O’Brady’s transgressions that have landed him in deep shit. It’s not that being ignorant about the history of adventure in Antarctica is by itself so bad, but because he is so selectively ignorant it becomes inexcusable. It’s not so much that he outright lied, but that he was, if you’re to be generous, untruthful about just so many details of his crossing. It’s also that he so brazenly reshaped the “rules of adventure” to his own benefit, even though none of these rules are as of yet scribed in stone. And it’s that he leveraged his own PR team and allowed the hyperbolically predisposed writers and editors to do a lot of the work of over-glorifying his adventure for him.
The real “problem with Colin O’Brady,” as the NatGeo story frames it, beyond his embellishments, is that he is not alone in using these tactics. From polar crossings to our own climbing world, it feels quite commonplace to follow “adventure athletes” who are openly using these same gimmicks to varying degrees to build successful careers and create amazing opportunities for themselves.
In fact, isn’t this just how it’s done?
“For decades, adventurers have manipulated language and withheld information in order to present their journeys in the most flattering light,” writes Gildea. “Using subtle qualifiers that mean something to them and their competitors and not much to anyone else, they sought to gain sponsorship and enhance reputation.”
This is true, and I would only add that athletes aren’t always to blame for how these “subtle qualifiers” can become misconstrued. That said, there’s also an element of plausible deniability here that allows athletes like O’Brady to cast blame away from themselves.
As a writer who has written for many major news organizations, I’ve known that most editors have no knowledge about the rules dictating these niche sports nor do they understand their deep and important histories. The act of splitting hairs is not a game practiced by people most interested in generating clicks to a website—and oftentimes, writers don’t get to see or approve headlines before they run.
One recent example of this in the climbing world may be Sasha DiGiulian’s 2015 ascent of Magic Mushroom—a 600-meter 7c+ on the right flank of Eiger—which was inaccurately described by most of the news stories as a “first female ascent of the Eiger” when in fact was merely a first female ascent of the route Magic Mushroom, which is about 1/3 the height of the normal “North Face” as most of us think of it and also doesn’t even go to the summit. It’s easy to understand how editors and producers like the sound of “first female ascent of the Eiger” more than “first female ascent of Magic Mushroom,” but for Sasha, her sponsors and PR people, and the journalists who covered this story, for all of them to have let this headline go uncorrected or unquestioned and make it onto TV is bad for everyone in climbing—especially all of the other women who have climbed the Eiger’s North Face, whose ascents were effectively whitewashed by this kind of clickbait.
So what? It does beg the question of who really cares? Although geeks and armchair sticklers seem to most care about these kinds of points, in fact, we all have a stake in getting it right because these distinctions allow us to measure progress and value true greatness when it appears.
Let me take a stab at unbraiding the strands that seem to be contributing to this predicament.
The first thing is that “firsts” are getting harder and harder to come by. We like to say that “it’s all been done” … and it’s kind of true. In addition to having “been done,” it was also done in the past when everything was just harder—with less information, poorer gear, fewer resources, worse concepts about training, scarier questions, bigger unknowns. When any accomplishment today is placed within the history of what was done before, even if today’s iteration is technically harder, it often comes up short compared to what was achieved in the past with far fewer resources. (That said, I will make the notable exception of Alex Honnold’s El Cap free solo, which I still think is the greatest sporting achievement ever.)
Speaking of El Cap … that brings me to my second point, which is that the “rules of adventure” are so utterly indistinct and vague as to detract from everything that we should care about in climbing. The shenanigans that take place on El Capitan, for example, come to mind as the clearest example of how our sport suffers from a lack of clarity—and ultimately, a lack of vocabulary—around describing and evaluating one free ascent against another.
We use terms like “onsight” and “flash” to distinguish between how much prior knowledge about a route one has before a successful first-try send, but we have no real terms to describe the number of shenanigans that take place leading up to and even during the ultimate free ascent of a big-wall route. Clearly, a climber who spends months mini-Traxioning crux pitches on Freerider is not as rad as the climber who only works the route ground-up, but at the end of the day, once both climbers succeed, they get to share in an equal claim to have freed the route. Yet, style matters—or it should.
(Never mind the increasingly common tactic of falling and only lowering to a “no hands” stance partway up a pitch and then yo-yo-ing from there … whatever that’s called!)
I was talking about this with David Allfrey recently, and half-jokingly we decided that a “shenanigan point system” could be employed in which each type of shenanigan—from stashing gear or yo-yo-ing or egregious TR rehearsal—could be assigned a shenanigan point value added onto your tick, e.g.: Freerider (VI 5.13a with 7 shenanigans).
Even words like “team free” are prone to subjective usage, and I’ve heard this term used to describe everything from the “second doesn’t have to free the pitch” to both climbers free every pitch. In other words, almost complete opposites.
That we don’t have the vocabulary to describe these scenarios is one thing, but the fact that professional climbers/adventurers are taking advantage of this murkiness to cast their own accomplishments in the most flattering light possible is another. I wonder if they get away with this because no one really wants to be the inconvenient pettifogger who stands among a cheering audience of fans and with a wan finger in the air tries to stop the parade as it marches by.
The third issue is that the incentives for using these tools are quite high right now because, for the first time in history, we have an actual outdoor industry with actual money that is endlessly hungry to create new content around new athletes that dovetail with their new campaigns. If you’re not telling the biggest story, in the biggest way possible—never mind if a few details are omitted or selectively recast in favorable ways—then someone else who is willing to do this will take your spot.
And besides, I actually think that this is what people want. They don’t want to read about the fiftieth chucklehead to Do Some Thing. They don’t care about that person, but they do care about someone who is first, even if that person has to twist himself into a knot to meet that definition.
The last issue is that people today seem to be less and less interested in the history and achievements of those who came before them. There’s a real hubris that undergirds the behavior of guys like O’Brady, a Yale grad who spent a stint selling stocks, a guy who likes to say he’s been to the North Pole but who also doesn’t say he was guided there, and who apparently “denigrates” those around him. Magnanimity doesn’t come to mind in reading about this character. It’s no surprise that someone like this also probably doesn’t care much about some guy named Borge Ousland.
The questions that remain for me are why are companies sponsoring people like this? (I have no idea.)
Why do we continue to let them share their stories in their own contrived contexts? (Social media is largely to blame here.)
And will our desire for hearing about “firsts” continue to create these incentives that turn every adventure—even meaningful and important ones—into low-grade clickbait garbage? (The answer here, I think, is yes.)
Finally, shenanigans anyone?
“Posers gotta pose so haters can hate, who cares about the truth-just keep serving me some clickbait!” First to leave a comment on this piece during a pandemic.