The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  Jornet is a private person, but he is a very public athlete, and his workouts are readily accessible on Strava and Movescount (Suun­to’s proprietary site). The volume is startling. Three days before the Marathon du Mont Blanc, he ran up and down the Mont Blanc massif—14,000 vertical feet—in seven hours. His “taper week” prior to the Hardrock 100 in July included a 35-mile ascent of Mount Eolus and a 26-mile run up Mount Elbert, both Colorado fourteeners.

  I started to question if these feats were even possible without some kind of pharmaceutical or other assistance. It saddened me to feel suspicious, but who could forget the now-infamous 2001 Nike ad in which Lance Armstrong says, “What am I on? I’m on my bike, busting my ass, six hours a day. What are you on?” Yet credible doping allegations followed Armstrong throughout his career. There was his relationship with Michele Ferrari, the disgraced Italian doctor, and accusations from former teammates and friends. With Jornet, there have been occasional whispers of foul play but nothing concrete, just garden-variety trolling and speculation that could reasonably be chalked up to professional jealousy.

  Doping would be risky to try to hide. As a member of both the World Anti-Doping Agency’s regulatory program and Athletes for Transparency, Jornet must provide records of his whereabouts and doctor prescriptions, and he could be tested as often as once per month by an administrator who shows up at his door unannounced. And while Jornet now makes a six-figure salary through sponsorships, skimo and ultra-running don’t offer anything close to the financial rewards that tempt athletes in cycling and marathon running, sports plagued by doping scandals.

  “There’s no incentive,” says John Gaston, the top U.S. skimo racer, who spent the year training and racing on the European World Cup circuit. “There’s hardly any money in our sport. And now you see people catching up to him. The competition is tight. If you get to know him, I think he loves the mountains too much to compromise the world in that way.”

  * * *

  In recent years, Jornet has transcended traditional endurance sports, establishing himself in an elite club of adventurers that is reinventing high-mountain objectives. In Norway, Jornet showed me a spreadsheet he’d made, prosaically titled “Cronology [sic] of Significant Events Related to Going Fast in the Mountains.” It contained hundreds of entries, covering everything from trail running to steep skiing, tracking all the way back to the year 1040 with a running contest that Scottish king Malcolm Canmore hosted to find a speedy courier. The document was exquisite in its geekiness. Jornet wasn’t merely a participant, he was a scholar.

  Three years ago, he began teaming up for occasional climbs with the late Ueli Steck, aka the Swiss Machine. It was a natural partnership. Steck was the preternaturally talented sport climber who could flash up technical routes faster than almost anyone. Jornet was the aerobic monster who could grind fast and forever on little food or water. In 2015, they joined forces to billy-goat up the north face of the Eiger via the classic 1938 route. A typical round-trip of the route requires three days. It was Jornet’s first time, but the pair summited in four hours and were back in town in less than 10.

  In April 2017, Jornet was on Cho Oyu, in Tibet, when Steck died on Nuptse, Everest’s 25,791-foot neighbor. Steck had been acclimatizing, alone and high on the mountain, when he fell to his death. Beyond losing a friend, Jornet had lost a special peer he could consult with. “We talked a lot about what it means to move in the mountains,” Jornet told me. “Ueli was coming from a supertechnical background—like pure difficulty—and I was coming from endurance. We were both trying to learn from each other.”

  Like Jornet, Steck had encountered controversy around certain climbs, including what may have been his biggest achievement: a 28-hour solo ascent of Annapurna’s lethal south face. Steck produced no summit photos (he claimed that his camera had been knocked out of his hand by an avalanche) or GPS data (he didn’t record any). Nevertheless, based largely on the credibility of Steck’s previous accomplishments, he was awarded the Piolet d’Or, climbing’s highest honor, for the Annapurna ascent.

  The case leveled against Jornet’s back-to-back Everest climbs is similar: a lack of documentation verifying a historic accomplishment. The dispute is being pushed primarily by a single individual, a climber named Dan Howitt based in Portland, Oregon. After the climb, Howitt produced and circulated a 19-page document that reviewed, in painstaking detail, Jornet’s ascent of Cho Oyu, in early May, and both of his Everest climbs later that same month.

  Howitt’s case against Jornet focuses on two main points: no persuasive summit images and questionable GPS data. Given the significance of the claims, he convinced a British website called Mount Everest the British Story, to publish the document in full in the summer of 2017. The report sparked widespread debate. It also prompted threats directed at the website’s staff via online comments and Facebook. “Some people enjoyed the read, but most disagreed with what Dan had written,” Collin Wallace, the website’s founder, wrote me in an email. A few critics warned that they would “give the website a bad name” and that Wallace should “get legal advice about publishing the article.” Concerned about losing the audience it had taken him a decade to build, Wallace promptly removed the piece.

  Howitt persisted, however, lobbying media outlets, including Outside, and claiming that he could prove Jornet had come up short, at least on the first Everest ascent. When he compared Jornet’s summit track on a topographic map with Adrian Ballinger’s, Jornet’s route appears to terminate in a different location, presumably below the summit. (Jornet’s watch had inexplicably recorded part of the descent for the second climb, but nothing more.)

  Howitt’s report raises legitimate questions, but it mainly delivers uncertainty—by no means proof that Jornet is a fraud. That’s a common phenomenon in our digital age. Wade into the online record-keeping of nearly any endurance sport and you’ll encounter a few obsessives who’ve made a hobby out of endlessly questioning and parsing the latest FKT. Howitt has assumed this role in the mountaineering realm for nearly two decades. A climber who has claimed speed records on Mounts Rainier, Hood, Adams, Shasta, and others, he had waged a years-long crusade against the late Chad Kellogg, a well-respected mountaineer from Washington who claimed FKTs on Rainier and elsewhere.

  Jornet remained largely quiet as his accuser continued his media campaign. He eventually responded to the allegations in December, but the defense was thin: his GPS had malfunctioned, and photos and video were embargoed until a documentary film, The Path to Everest, was released in the spring. That same month, he appeared on the Talk Ultra podcast, hosted by Ian Corless, and offered up additional details, but it hardly put an end to the controversy. The cover story in Spanish climbing magazine Des­nivel, which relied on Howitt’s report, was published the following month.

  * * *

  One evening in Romsdal, I join Jornet, Forsberg, and their friend Ida Nilsson, the elite Swedish runner and skimo racer, for dinner. Forsberg grows much of their food on the property. For dinner she’s prepared a rich lentil stew and fresh bread made from locally produced spelt flour.

  After the meal, I ask Jornet to walk me through the Everest climb. I expect the question to mark the immediate end of the dinner party’s convivial vibe. Instead, Jornet seems happy to go over it in detail. We settle on the couch next to a wood-burning stove, in front of his laptop, where he shares his collection of photos and videos.

  Jornet tells me that they spent less than a month total in Tibet, the first 10 days on 26,864-foot Cho Oyu, before moving on to Everest Base Camp, at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier. It was a small team—just Jornet, Montaz-Rosset, Forsberg, and their Nepali cook, Sitaram.

  Back in Norway, prior to the trip, Jornet and Forsberg had pre-acclimatized for one month, cranking out high-intensity intervals on a stationary bike while sucking reduced oxygen through a face mask. It seemed to work: Jornet arrived in the Himalayas feeling better than he had on his previous two trips. Forsberg eventually turned back before the top on C
ho Oyu, but Jornet reached the broad plateau on May 14. Howitt and others have said it couldn’t be claimed as a summit, and Jornet agreed: he acknowledges that he merely reached the plateau. But that was enough. Cho Oyu was only a preamble for the two weeks ahead.

  Forsberg returned to Norway for a race, while Jornet, Montaz-Rosset, and Sitaram set up on Everest’s north-side moraine. It was a comically tiny headquarters: a mess tent and three small personal shelters, nothing like the sprawling expeditions that bloom around Base Camp each spring. On May 18, after a one-night layover at advanced base camp, at 21,300 feet, Jornet made a trial run—literally—on some sections. He was ascending nearly 1,000 feet an hour, an impossible pace, all the way to 27,500 feet. “I did some stupid sprint on the North Ridge,” he laughs, “because I could.” The summit glistened temptingly less than 2,000 vertical feet above and Jornet felt great, but he stuck to his plan: descend to Base Camp, recover, and make an actual attempt in a couple of days.

  As he narrates, Jornet cues up a series of images and video clips he took with a GoPro along the route. On May 20, he departed Base Camp at 10 p.m. to make his first try for the summit. By the time he reached the North Col, at 23,000 feet, he felt terrible and began wrestling with stomach problems. He was moving, as he says into the camera at one point, “So. Fucking. Slow.”

  It was almost sunset by the time he turned onto the Northeast Ridge, the nearly horizontal mile-long approach to the summit that includes three prominent steps. He was alone now, plodding forward. There is a dimly lit final photo on the ridge and then video of his face in the darkness, illuminated by the GoPro’s small bulb. In the clip he’s sitting, breathing hard. Over his shoulder, briefly catching the light from his camera, I glimpse prayer flags, the only evidence that it’s the summit. “It was hard to film,” Jornet says. “It’s the last thing I was thinking about.”

  Next he took me through his second climb, including getting lost on the North Face. The weather was worse—windy and cold—but he felt better and moved more quickly, again summiting in the dark. He shows me another clip, but just of his face, no flags this time. He’s wearing a face mask and seems profoundly tired. I’d watched a lot of footage of Jornet in the preceding months, from various races and climbs, and I realized that this was the only time I’d ever seen him looking exhausted.

  He never claimed a speed record, he tells me. Early reports of an FKT were based on hasty press releases sent by his media team. (The FKT honor remains with Christian Stangl, who made the ascent in 2006 in 16 hours and 42 minutes, about 18 minutes faster than Jornet.) What he’s certain of is that he summited both times. When I ask what he made of all the questioning, he only offers casual indifference—it’s the media making hay.

  Jornet sits back in his chair. Outside the window, the January supermoon is rising above the fjord, bathing the landscape in a monochrome of blue and white. “You don’t think about much up there,” he says. “You only really think about moving. I remember I could see lights from the south, people just starting their climb from the South Col. But that’s about it.”

  * * *

  My last morning in Norway, I load into Jornet’s Mercedes Marco Polo camper van for a short trip to a jeep road along a nearby fjord. Jornet wears ski boots while he drives. We park and he’s ready to skin in minutes, while I fumble with my gear.

  “So, I think I go ahead and do some trainings now,” he says. It’s almost a question. Would I mind?

  “Great!” I say. “I’ll see you up there.”

  I know my way. It’s the same zone we skied on the first day of my visit, a soft snow cone of a summit 3,000 vertical feet above. The sky is overcast but unthreatening, and I’m relieved to ski at my snail pace. Jornet has done his best to be accommodating, and I’ve tried my best to keep up. After four days, I’m beat.

  I watch Jornet glide away on the snow-covered road, graceful, weightless. After an hour of steady effort, my base layer soggy with sweat, I reach the top. There are 360-degree views of the valley, the undulating fjords, the craggy peaks of the Troll Wall to the north, stabbing the sky. I look behind to find Jornet blasting up the slope toward me. As we remove our skins, I ignore the fact that this is his second lap. For the moment, I’m his equal, another friend in the mountains, gliding off the summit and down onto an apron of spongy snow. It’s blissful being back on the right side of gravity, swooping and whooping through clusters of scrub oak and fir. I encounter him again, briefly, back at the road, skins on, poles pumping, chugging back uphill for his third run.

  If Jornet was anything other than what he would have us believe, I found no evidence of it. Perhaps there was another, simpler explanation for his back-to-back Everest summits. Steve House, the alpinist and author, believes Jornet is an example of what happens when you log an average of almost 1,000 hours a year for 17 years—the compound interest of nearly two decades of progressive training. “All this volume allows him to do such a wide range of things,” House told me, “and to do them well.” They are collaborating on a book for uphill athletes.

  I spoke with Jornet again a few weeks after my trip to Norway. He’d been busy. He sent me a thorough rebuttal he composed to address the Everest claims, including numerous details about the GPS data, photo and video analysis, and a timeline of events. He was circulating his response to the media and the Himalayan Database, which still hadn’t confirmed his climbs.

  I read through the report. As with Howitt’s, there was no single piece of information that closed the case. But as a whole, it was the most convincing argument he’d made yet, laying out the intricacies of GPS tracking that help explain why his and Ballinger’s summit routes don’t align. Still, Jornet seemed resigned to the fact that clarity might be impossible. “I think there will always be fans, and there will be those who doubt,” he said. “I don’t want to spend time on the haters, but I understand about proof.”

  Jornet had also stormed back to racing, climbing, and skiing. In February, he placed first in the vertical and fourth in the individual race at the Puy Saint Vincent Ski Mountaineering World Cup in France, his first competition since surgery. A week later, not far from his home, he logged a first descent on a 55-degree pencil couloir on the Troll Wall that set the extreme-skiing world convulsing with adulation. And he’d started planning Summits of My Life 2, a preliminary list, at least, that included “projects bigger than Everest.”

  In March, Jornet competed in the Pierra Menta, a four-day race often touted as the Tour de France of skimo. On the fourth and final stage, he and his teammate, Jakob Herrmann, were leading and poised for the overall win when Jornet crashed on a downhill section and fractured his fibula. The injury would keep him in a cast for six weeks, but the prognosis was favorable. When I last heard from him, a few weeks after the accident, he sounded upbeat and optimistic, and he intended to be racing again by July. He was, it seemed, superhuman, but also human, after all.

  Kathryn Miles

  Is This Man a Victim?

  from Down East

  * * *

  Moninda Marube’s fame came to him unexpectedly. Which isn’t to say the competitive runner wasn’t seeking stardom. On the contrary, he came to the United States from his native Kenya dreaming of high-profile victories and lucrative sponsorships from companies like Nike. Instead, Marube has acquired a celebrity he never anticipated—as the face of human-trafficking survivors in Maine and nationwide.

  In that capacity, he has stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol alongside Maine senator Susan Collins, who praised him as “a person of remarkable courage and commitment.” He’s been the subject of newspaper, magazine, and radio stories and multiple documentary projects. He’s spoken at conferences and workshops and shared billing with Maine governor Paul LePage at the state’s Summit on Human Trafficking. On a CNN segment covering Marube’s 2015 attempt at an awareness-raising cross-country run, the network’s morning anchor declared, “You can’t believe in this day and age that that’s happening—slavery and human trafficking. But,
you know, he is living proof that it is.”

  I heard about Marube from a filmmaker who’d interviewed him for a documentary. I listened, enthralled, as the documentarian retold Marube’s story: How the runner had traveled to Coon Rapids, Minnesota, expecting to train with an expert manager, only to be exploited in unimaginable ways. How, even with his passport confiscated by his trafficker, he’d managed to escape under cloak of darkness, thanks to a dramatic rendezvous. How Border Patrol officers were so taken by his story that they let him go, despite his being out of status. How he found his way to Maine, thanks to big-hearted patrons, where he reinvented himself as an advocate and activist.

  When I contacted Marube last summer and asked whether I could interview him for a magazine profile, he was arguably at the height of his fame. Weeks before, he had reported to his local newspaper that he’d successfully outrun two black bears that had given chase while he was on a dawn training run in his adopted hometown of Auburn. The story of Marube’s escapes—from the bears and from his trafficker—had gone viral, appearing in outlets around the globe, with coverage of one or both from the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America, Time, Sports Illustrated, and others.

  Marube invited me to meet him on campus at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he was starting his sophomore year. He seemed eager to share his story.

  * * *

  Marube and I met one afternoon in September in the lobby of the university library. He was wearing a tracksuit and hooded sweatshirt, and with his reedy build, he could easily have passed for a decade younger than his 39 years. He was as mild and charming as friends and supporters had described him to me: soft-spoken, almost formal in his politeness, with a beatific smile. We chitchatted about late summer weather and the school year. Marube, who is undocumented, is studying community health at the western Maine liberal arts college, which he says he attends on a partial tuition waiver negotiated by Dan Campbell, his primary benefactor and the university’s track coach, with whom Marube lives in the summer and who pays the remainder of the runner’s tuition. (The university will not confirm details of enrollment or financial aid status.)