Climbing is different. As Hemingway put it, "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." Many

Climbing is different. As Hemingway put it, "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." Many performance-enhancing drugs are really bad for you; that is the rationale for banning doping in mere games, while permitting fancy shoes and other expensive performance-enhancing technologies. It doesn't work for mountaineering, because the sport itself is really, really bad for you, to the extent that death is a normal and accepted part of it. It would be obscene to enforce the rules of your game on other people when that posed a risk to their lives. They get to make their own rules, because the mountains are theirs as much as yours. This is also why climbers are ambivalent about competition. Matching what the other kids are doing is a big part of what motivates many climbers to try harder things. On the other hand, if two climbers start one-upping each other, they had better stop before one of them gets killed, because no pissing contest is worth dying for. Few do. I'm one of the exceptions, but that lesson involved so much luck that it made the front page of every newspaper in the country.