Why is Piolet D’Or Climbing’s Biggest and Most Controversial Award?


Garibotti knows the danger firsthand. By his count, more than 30 people he tied with rope later died while climbing. The Piolets d’Or sought to nominate Garibotti for the award, once in 2006 for a new route on Cerro Torre in Patagonia and once in 2009 for the first pass of the entire Cerro Torre massif. Twice she refused.

Most shocking was the person the jury decided to honor in 1998: a Russian team that made its 1997 debut on the western face of the Himalayan peak Makalu. Two climbers on the expedition died in the process. After the backlash that year, the organizers introduced a new criterion requiring that, according to Trommsdorff, “you must come back in one piece.”

The problem, Garibotti says, is not that rewards encourage climbers to take more risks, but that they justify risky behavior while rewarding risky climbs. “If there is representation of reckless climbs, there will be more reckless climbs,” he said.

After winning the Piolet d’Or with Slovenian teammates Ales Cesen and Luka Strazar in 2019, British mountaineer Tom Livingstone wrote: article he said on his website that the award alarmingly “played on my human ego.”

“I already have a demon on my shoulder at the end of an escape” – a sparsely guarded climb section that could result in dangerous falls – “who whispers, ‘uh oh, you’ll get a big one!’ Livingstone wrote. “I don’t want anyone else to offer me a gold trophy.” He accepted the award only because his teammates wanted it.

Of course, for many climbers, danger is a big part of the sport’s appeal.

“We have to accept that death is a possibility in traditional mountaineering,” said Reinhold Messner, 77, one of the most lauded alpinists of the last century. “If that’s not a possibility, it’s not mountaineering. The art of survival is just that. It is an art.”



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