While the Paris Games are underway, mountaineering timidly embraces the precepts of high performance, it tries to imitate sport, but the deaths of its participants remind us with stubborn abruptness that climbing remote mountains is a wild act, without rules, referees or spectators. It is not a sport, and may never be one. The world can now watch live or on repeat the tears of men and women who do not achieve their dreams of a medal. On the other hand, no one attends the failure of a mountaineer, there is no camera to capture the terrible moment of an accident, of a collapse, of an avalanche that determines that the game is over and that death will prevent a play-off. This summer, K2 has had the appearance of an Olympic stadium. On the one hand, no one had ever climbed the second highest mountain on the planet (8,611 m) so quickly: the French wizard Benjamin Védrines took 11 hours from base camp along the same route from which he conquered its tremendous summit in 1954. Unlike the pioneers Lacedelli and Compagnoni, Védrines is a machine trained with the severity of a cyclist. Where everyone experiences the agony of hypoxia and fears the objective dangers (falling rocks, ice masses, etc.), Védrines flies dressed as if he were going for a walk on Mont Blanc. He could wear a bib and no one would find him strange.
On the other hand, on the dark western side of K2 itself, far from the new mountain tourists, far from everything, even from life, the Japanese Kazuya Hiraide (45 years old) and Kenro Nakajima (39) were facing the challenge of their careers: they considered that their career path legitimised them to face one last great dream, a truly terrible one, one last journey before returning to being like everyone else. The west face of K2 is, in fact, a rock wall of almost 3,000 metres that has only been climbed once, in 2007, by a Russian platoon of 23 dedicated mountaineers. The two Japanese had twice won the prestigious Piolet d’Or, the award that distinguishes cult mountaineers. But they were never rock climbers, nor were they particularly skilled in mixed terrain of high difficulty, so nobody knew very well what route they planned to tackle in alpine style. Looking at the photos of the western slope as if it were a puzzle, on the left side you can see a succession of snowfields interrupted here and there by rock walls: it is the easiest path, although it is obviously exposed to falling snow and rocks. It is the route chosen in 1988 by the Pole Wojcieck Kurtyka and the Swiss Jean Troillet, two who wanted to take on the formidable challenge in alpine style. As this summer, the weather was horrible then, and the pair remained 56 days at the foot of the mountain without actually seeing a single day of sunshine. Finally, Kurtyka and Troillet launched two attacks on the mountain, but in both cases they did not go beyond 6,400 metres, scared off by the avalanches that swept away a route they christened the sickle given the shape of the corridor through which they intended to progress.
After weeks of waiting, the long-awaited window of good weather reached K2 on July 24: all the mountaineers set off up the slopes at a run, none as fast as Védrines, of course. Two days later, a pair of Pakistani army helicopters were searching for something on the west face. They soon found two figures in the snow, motionless. Hiraide and Nakajima were still in the same position two days later: something had made them fall from an altitude close to 7,000 metres. Given the impossibility of rescuing them from the air (the army’s aircraft are not prepared for a difficult rescue), there was speculation about organising a rescue from the ground, an idea that was soon dismissed, leaving the Japanese couple for dead. Kazuya Hiraide could have tried to beat Védrines’ record: he was always a physical prodigy. But he was not interested: “The normal mountain routes do not give me the experience I am looking for,” he admitted last December during a visit to San Sebastian. Much more than a sport, Hiraide and Nakajima’s mountaineering was a game of exploration, of cunning, of unknowns, of commitment sprinkled with uncontrollable parameters where luck had an important specific weight. Being smarter than the whims of the terrain. Being fast when necessary. Not making mistakes. Not underestimating the mountain or overestimating one’s own capabilities. The more Hiraide grew as a mountaineer, the better he knew the mountains and the more fears they instilled in him: “Now that I have lived through so many experiences, I know perfectly well how terrible the high mountains can be, I know their traps better and that is why I fear them. I need someone strong at my side like Nakajima to trust in my abilities,” he explained a few months ago in a disconcerting speech devoid of the ego typical of mountaineers. Ultimately, elite mountaineering is a permanent fight against the fear of the unknown, against inner demons.
These days, a team of Pakistani mountaineers has been able to recover the body of high-altitude porter Muhammad Hassan, sadly famous for having suffered a fall last summer at the K2 bottleneck (at about 8,450 metres) and dying before the eyes of all those who judged it more important to reach the summit than to rescue him. Almost at the same time, a Russian group has travelled to Gasherbrum IV to search for and collect the body of Dimitry Golovchenko, who disappeared when he fell into the void while trying to open a new route with Sergey Nilov. Collecting the bodies of mountaineers who have fallen in the Himalayas is a final gesture of respect, of empathy with their families. It is the symbolic presentation of medals where one celebrates not a one-off success, but a way of understanding life, however incomprehensible it may be for ordinary mortals.
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