The summer season in mountaineering has reopened the controversy over the veracity of the summits on the eight-thousanders. The trigger was the announcement by Italian Marco Confortola that he had crowned Gasherbrum I and thus completed the 14 eight-thousanders, without using supplementary oxygen.
His compatriot Simone Moro was blunt: “All this is a scam; he has not climbed all the eight-thousanders”.Moro has more than 70 expeditions under his beltand four first winter ascents of eight-thousanders: Shisha Pangma (achieved with Piotr Morawski in 2005), Makalu (with Denis Urubko in 2009), Gasherbrum II (with Denis Urubko and Cory Richards in 2011) and Nanga Parbat (with Alex Txikon and Ali Sadpara in 2016).
Interviewed in La Republica,Moro went on to question Confortola’s achievements: “He has reached eight confirmed summits; six more are missing. Mine is not a war against a person I don’t even know. I raise my voice because, if I remained silent, Italian mountaineering would be ridiculed. I challenge Confortola to prove otherwise and to prove that he is the victim of a conspiracy by the international mountaineering community“.
Moro pointed out that Confortola may have manipulated the photos he took on some of the eight-thousanders: “They were taken with rocks and ice well below the summit as a backdrop. In some cases, with Photoshop, Confortola replaced the faces of the climbers with his own. All the more reason it is considered a scam”.According to El Pais, he manipulated a photograph of Jorge Egocheaga on Lhotse to claim this eight-thousander.
It’s all a scam; he hasn’t climbed all the eight-thousanders
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Confortola, who survived the tragedy that shook K2 in August 2008 with 11 climbers killed in two days, gave his version in La Stampa: “I know where I climbed and what I did. I was up there, not with him, of course. And now they are smearing me with mud, with accusations, but who does Simone Moro think he is? They are envious of me because I am nice, I talk about my exploits in companies that hire me to motivate their employees”.
Beyond the alleged doctored photos, there are also testimonies from Sherpas questioning Confortola’s summits on Kangchenjunga (“The Sherpa can say what he wants. On Kangchenjunga I had corneal edema and that’s it,” the Italian told Lo Scappone, the website of the Italian Alpine Club) or on Annapurna in 2010, where according to climber Silvio Mondinelli, his compatriot never reached the summit. “We crossed paths, he was going down and I was going up. Then, afterwards, I caught up with him going down, it’s true. It’s my word against his,” Confortola replied.
I know where I climbed and what I did, they envy me
In many cases, reaching the summit is a matter of faith. “We do not issue certificates, we only record ascents. We do our work on trust. If we see that something is not right, we ask for photos, GPS… “, Billi Bierling, a Himalayan summit watchman, said in an interview with MARCA in 2019. In today’s world, new technologies do allow greater control over what is achieved and how it is achieved on an eight-thousander.
Reinhold Messner, Princess of Asturias Award for Sports together with Polish Krzysztof Wielicki in 2018, also spoke out on this controversy. “I follow traditional mountaineering, where an elegant style and a certain way of moving are important. Confortola belongs to the era of tourists, not mountaineers“.
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