Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301100040
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD O'MARA THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: LONDON LENGTH: Medium
NORWEGIAN GOING IT ALONE
Well, history is supposed to evolve from tragedy to farce, or at least from sadness to gladness.Much of the world wept 81 years ago when Capt. Robert Falcon Scott of the British Royal Navy and four of his comrades died after coming in second to Norwegian Roald Amundsen in the race to the South Pole.
It might be forgiven if the world laughs today, or at least smiles in approbation, at the outcome of the second great race across the Antarctic, if only because nobody died.
A Norwegian won again. Just before 5:30 a.m. Thursday, Erling Kagge skied into the U.S. Amundsen-Scott station at the pole. He had crossed 814 miles of snow and ice, through biting winds and temperatures sometimes reaching 70 degrees below zero.
The 29-year-old Oslo lawyer started from Berkner Island in the Weddell Sea, alone, pulling his supplies on a sled. It took him 52 days. He had no support, no prepositioned supplies, no guidance or aircraft protecting him.
No one had ever done that before.
"It is quite an achievement, a remarkable thing," said Bernard Moran of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. "I understand we have two Britons doing a comparable thing, if they're still at it."
They are. The British team consisting of Sir Ranulf Fiennes and Dr. Michael Stroud reportedly was still slogging toward the pole Wednesday, 100 miles south of it. Their aim is to march across the southern continent. Like Kagge, they are hauling their supplies.
Although it was good news to all Norwegians, not everybody has been impressed by Kagge's achievement, or all that disappointed at another apparent British polar failure. A reporter for London's The Independent newspaper, dispatched to southern Chile presumably to cover the race, ungenerously described Kagge as "brattish."
And Peter Clarkson, the executive secretary of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research at the Scott Polar Research Institute, also in Cambridge, said that he hadn't the slightest idea what Kagge was trying to achieve.
"It's basically adventure," he said, meaning an enterprise without scientific content. "Many of these private expeditions come under the umbrella of tourism. Many adventurers, people seeking a new challenge, go to Antarctica because relatively few people have been there."