A mountaineer hailed as the greatest of all time has been stripped of two world records after a map expert alleged he missed a summit by five metres.
Italian Reinhold Andreas Messner’s legendary record has stood for 37 years after he was credited with conquering all 14 Himalayan peaks over 8,000 metres.
Messner, now 79, was further credited with beating all the summits known as the Eight Thousanders without oxygen tanks.
Now it has emerged that the climber had apparently miscalculated the summit of Annapurna mountain in Nepal in 1985.
Map expert Eberhard Jurgalski, from Loerrach, Germany, now claims that Messner missed the summit by five metres (16ft) after turning back too early.
Jurgalski studied satellite images of the peak and the climber’s note which say he could see his base camp from the summit.
He discovered, reports local media, that the base camp was impossible to see from the peak and concluded Messner turned back agonisingly short of the summit.
The cartographer says Messner was 65 metres (213 feet) away and five metres (16 feet) under the true summit.
Amateur map expert Jurgalski branded Messner ‘clueless’ and ‘not an expert’.
His findings were enough for Guinness World Records officials used to strip Messner of two of his titles last week.
They removed his ranking as the first person to climb all 8,000-metre mountains and his second record, saying he did it without supplementary oxygen,
Editor-in-Chief of Guinness World Records Craig Glenday said in a statement obtained by Newsflash: “The Guinness World Records titles affected by this reclassification of ‘true summits’ have necessarily had to be reset in order to reflect the base-camp-to-summit requirements.
“This should in no way detract from the incredible pioneering achievements made by some of the most significant mountaineers over the past 50 years.
“However, in the same way that we require marathon runners to finish the full 42.195-kilometre (26.219-mile) course and circumnavigators to cover at least the 40.075-kilometre (24.900-mile) circumference of the Earth, for a mountain climb to qualify for a Guinness World Records title, we must insist on a base-camp-to-true-summit ascent, as per the updated 8000ers.com guidelines.”
He is now only listed as a ‘legacy’ record holder, while the new world record holder is American climber Edmund Viesturs, 64, who climbed the last great peak in 2005.
Guinness said: “Many climbers – usually through no fault of their own – stopped before reaching the summit.”
But Messner dismissed the new claim in an interview with the German Press Association saying: “He has no idea. He is not an expert.
“He just confused the mountain. Of course, we arrived at the summit.”
He continued: “I don’t care if my name is in the Guinness Book. You can’t take away a record that I’ve never claimed.”
Jurgalski has been studying mountaineers’ accounts of their ascents against satellite and photographic data for ten years.
He says he discovered that mountaineers had misidentified the summits of at least three of the tallest peaks in the world.
Moreover, the true number of people who have successfully climbed all fourteen 8,000-er mountains was just four rather than the 44 believed at the moment.
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Story By: Georgina Jedikovska, Sub-Editor: Michael Leidig, Agency: Central European News
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