The Best American Sports Writing 2014

by Glenn Stout

  The course itself looked magnificent, rising out of a dusty field, southeast of the airport, that the city council had voted to annex less than two weeks before the race, in order to boost property-tax rolls. Those not arriving by helicopter had the option of taking a shuttle bus from downtown or parking in cow pastures along the access road, for $35, and using the two- or three-mile walk to get acclimated to the grinding whine of all the engine noise—the “glorious assault on the senses,” the official race announcer later called it—as the 133-foot ascent to the first turn came into focus. “Turn One,” I’d been told back in Milton Keynes, was “going to be epic.” It was a blind hairpin to the left, and would require drivers to downshift to first gear after a furious sprint up the hill. Hermann Tilke, the Robert Trent Jones of Formula One, was the architect, and I gathered that he’d given the undiscerning American audience of 115,000 an international sampler of sorts, borrowing an S-curve and a horseshoe bend from Interlagos and Istanbul, respectively, and alluding elsewhere to the swift Becketts Corner of England’s Silverstone.

  Through practice and qualifying, the drivers’ times steadily improved as the track was in effect rubberized when the burned residue of the tires formed a smoother surface. Because of the circuit’s newness, oil was still being released by the settling asphalt, and the competitors used words like “shiny,” “icy,” “slippery,” “wet,” and “green” to describe the conditions. “Green, yeah, dirty,” Newey said, sipping a cup of coffee a few hours before the race, and dismissing as an “occupational hazard” the nuisance of shutterbugs who had gathered for a shot of the wizard at rest. Newey had been vindicated in the wing-flexing controversy, which the FIA race director, in a press conference, attributed to an optical illusion, and Vettel and Webber, benefiting from still further tweaks to the front wing angles and the ride height, had secured the first and third spots on the grid.

  Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, placed a disappointing eighth, which he deemed “logical,” a result of inferior machinery. Even worse, this left him on the “dirty,” or less rubberized, side of the track. Ferrari officials then made the cynical decision to sabotage their other driver, Felipe Massa, to help Alonso. With less than an hour to go before the ceremonial parade lap (in classic American muscle cars, naturally), they broke the seal on Massa’s gearbox. Massa, who had actually been faster than Alonso in qualifying, was automatically penalized, and forced to drop back five spots. The newly configured grid placed Alonso in seventh, back on the clean side—and tough luck to those drivers from Force India, Lotus, and Williams who in turn were shifted from clean to dirty, as collateral damage. My Twitter feed filled with concerns from Formula One partisans that this might not sit well with an American audience obsessed by questions of fairness (“Yanks like sport over tactics”), ignoring the larger problem of widespread confusion.

  Was Turn One indeed epic? There were no collisions or spinouts, so I’d have to vote no, although I was informed, after the cars had disappeared from view, that Alonso had managed to squirt past a driver or two. A veteran race observer once described for me the conversational rhythm among spectators in terms of 90-second intervals, or roughly the amount of time it takes a car to complete a three-and-a-half-mile lap. That is, you talk for 90 seconds, and then pause out of necessity when the cars whiz by again, trying in vain to hold a thought as your teeth vibrate. I found that this held true only for the first few laps, when the cars remained bunched together, and before any drivers had stopped for a change of tires. Soon enough, the interruptions were more frequent and intermittent, and it was easier to understand the proliferation of champagne as a desensitizing device.

  I was fortunate to be watching from Red Bull’s section of the Paddock Club, above the pit lane, with the high rollers who had paid $5,000 each for the full experience: gnocchi, booze, and even a DJ from Miami, named Erok, whom Red Bull flies around the world to perpetuate its image as the brash upstart of the scene. Some helpful representatives of Infiniti, one of Red Bull’s subsidiary sponsors, distributed handheld video screens that allowed you to shuffle between camera views from each of the cars, and after some experimentation I concluded that the best way to watch the race was from the perspective of McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton, who had been made to obscure the painted letters “HAM” on his helmet after race officials learned that they were a reference not to his name but to the song by Kanye West and Jay-Z (and meant “hard as a motherfucker”).

  By the midpoint, it was shaping up as a two-man race between Vettel and Hamilton, with Alonso in a distant third. (Webber’s alternator blew on the 17th lap, forcing his withdrawal.) Hamilton’s car was faster in a straight line—by 11 kilometers per hour, the BBC commentary said—but seemed to lack the Red Bull’s downforce, or grip, and he slid more in the corners. On my screen, as I pretended to be Hamilton, Vettel would appear larger and closer each time we approached a sharp turn, only to scurry away again as we accelerated out. The cat-and-mouse game continued for more than 20 minutes, as Hamilton narrowed the gap to within DRS-boosting range.

  Newey stood in the pit lane with several team officials, wearing noise-canceling headphones and staring at a bank of computer screens, in a bit of pageantry for the television production. (“We could probably do a better job in the back of the garage,” he confessed. “You’re strung out in a line. You can’t hear anything.”) They monitored live data from the hundreds of sensors in Vettel’s chassis and engine, advising on tire conditions, and communicated via radio and instant message with another group of technicians seated in a command center back in Milton Keynes, some of whom simulated the race in real time, forecasting when Hamilton and Alonso and the others might make a pit stop.

  The ample technical support was unable to help Vettel overcome his biggest obstacle: the inconvenient slowness of Narain Karthikeyan, of the struggling Hispania Racing Team. Vettel cursed into his microphone as he downshifted into Turn Eleven on his 43rd lap and found himself momentarily impeded by Karthikeyan, bringing up the rear on his own 42nd. The brief logjam brought Hamilton to within a couple of car lengths, and gave him the window he needed on the following straight. Up went the DRS flap on Hamilton’s rear wing. More cursing. The cat had overtaken the mouse.

  Vettel would have to wait another week to secure his third title, but, in accordance with the complexities of Formula One, Red Bull still had cause for celebration. The second-place finish in Austin was worth enough points in the team standings to clinch the Constructors’ Championship, the source of the big prize money, if not of the cork-popping glory. Few in the Paddock Club, or among the departing crowd, for that matter, seemed to notice all the Red Bull personnel assembling on the track for a team photo after Mario Andretti had welcomed the victorious Hamilton and the runners-up, Vettel and Alonso, to the podium for the ceremonial Mumm spraying. The garages were being hurriedly disassembled. On the Jumbotron above, a man in a cowboy hat sang “Margaritaville.” Newey lingered a while longer, speaking politely to the remaining British TV cameras, and raised his fist and thumb in the air. Last week, a report surfaced in the Italian press that Ferrari had resumed its pursuit of his services.

  NICK PAUMGARTEN

  The Manic Mountain

  FROM THE NEW YORKER

  UELI STECK’S CLOSEST BRUSH with death, or at least the time he thought it likeliest that he was about to die, came not when he plummeted 700 feet down the south face of Annapurna, or spidered up the Eiger’s fearsome North Face alone and without ropes in under three hours, or slipped on wet granite while free-climbing the Golden Gate route of El Capitan with his wife, on their honeymoon, but, rather, while he was hugging his knees in a tent on Mount Everest, hiding from a crowd of Sherpas who were angry that his climbing partner had called one of them a “motherfucker,” in Nepali. They were threatening to kill him. He had no escape. He had planned everything so scrupulously. The intended route up the mountain was sublime, the conditions perfect. He had spent years honing his body and his mind while tending to his proje
cts and the opportunities that arose out of them. As a climber, he knew that the mountains can foil the best-laid plans, that in an instant a routine ascent can turn into a catalog of horrors. But it would be ridiculous to die like this. The expedition had hardly begun.

  Steck had made his first trip to Everest in May 2011, at the age of 34. He’d built a reputation as one of the world’s premier alpinists—“the Swiss Machine,” some called him, to his dismay—by ascending, in record time, alone and without ropes, Europe’s notorious north faces and then by taking on bold Himalayan routes, with style and speed. Everest hardly fit the pattern. In recent years, accomplished mountaineers in search of elegant, difficult, and original climbs had tended to steer clear of its crowds, expense, and relative drudgery. Still, Everest is Everest. Steck felt the pull.

  That spring, 500 feet from the summit, he turned back, concerned that frostbite might claim his toes. He was also uncharacteristically spent, after climbing two other 8,000-meter peaks in previous weeks. (The goal of three in one trip was new.) But an idea had taken hold: a route that, if accomplished from beginning to end, would represent a milestone of modern mountaineering, a glorious plume. He began scheming and training for it. He returned a year later, to attain the summit via the standard route—a step toward the goal. He reached the top in the company of the lead group of Sherpas, the local people, many of whom work as porters and guides for the commercial expeditions on Everest. This was on the first day that the weather cleared for a summit push. The next day, the crowds went up—hundreds of aspirants, most of them clients of commercial companies, and their Sherpas—and, amid the traffic jam approaching the summit, four climbers died, of exposure and cerebral edema.

  This year, Steck arrived in Nepal at the beginning of April. He intended to spend as long as six weeks prior to his summit push acclimatizing to Everest’s high altitude, going on forays up the mountain from base camp, which is 17,600 feet above sea level. (The summit is 29,028 feet.) He’d kept his plans secret. He has long disdained revealing the details of expeditions in advance. He doesn’t indulge in what he calls “tasty talking”—boasting of feats he has not yet accomplished. Also, a climber must generally be discreet about a bold route, to prevent other climbers from going there first. He was not displeased when climbing blogs reported, incorrectly, that he was going up the South Face. He had something else in mind.

  His partners were Simone Moro, a 45-year-old Italian who’d been climbing in the Himalayas for more than 20 years (he’d summited Everest four times), and Jonathan Griffith, an English climber and photographer who lives in Chamonix. By the end of the month, they were established at Camp 2, at 21,300 feet, beyond the top of the Khumbu Icefall, a tumbling portion of the Khumbu Glacier mined with crevasses and seracs.

  At 8:00 A.M. on April 27, they set out for Camp 3 (24,000 feet), where they planned to spend a night, to acclimatize. To get there, they had to scale the Lhotse Face, a towering slope of sheer ice and wind-battered snow. The Lhotse Face is the main ramp up to a saddle called the South Col and then on to the standard Southeast Ridge route, the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascended 60 years ago and which is now tramped by hundreds of amateur climbers a year. Every season, the commercial operators put in fixed ropes along the route up the face and the ridge—a kind of bannister to the top, which any client can clip on to and pull himself along using a clamping device called a jumar. Last week, an 80-year-old Japanese man reached the summit.

  April 27 was the day that a team of Sherpas were installing the fixed rope. It is an essential and difficult job, involving heavy gear and extreme working conditions on an ice cliff riddled with crevasses. The day before, the Sherpas, with help from three Western guides, had nearly completed the job but came to an untraversable crevasse, which had forced them to take the whole rope system down and return in frustration the next day to start over along a different path.

  Earlier in the month, there had been a meeting at base camp among the expedition leaders at which it was agreed that while the Sherpas were fixing the Lhotse Face, no one else would climb there. Steck and Moro, a small professional team and not part of the commercial-trip ecosystem, had not been at the meeting.

  Later that morning, Steck, Moro, and Griffith reached the base of the face. A few Sherpas and an American guide asked them not to climb. “The Sherpas asked nicely,” Dawa Steven Sherpa, an expedition leader who had two Sherpas on the fixing team, told me. “Sherpas are really afraid of the Lhotse Face. They really get nervous.” But the Westerners felt that they could continue without interfering with the fixing crew. They climbed 150 feet to the left of the fixed ropes. They themselves had no ropes. They were climbing “alpine style”—that is, without any fixed protection, porters, or supplemental oxygen. Each had crampons over his boots and an ice ax in one hand. Unencumbered, they moved fast. Two Sherpas, annoyed, used their ice axes to knock chunks of ice down at them, until a Western guide, hearing of this over the radio, told them to stop. After an hour, Steck and the others reached the level of Camp 3, where they would have to traverse the face to get to their tent, which meant they needed to cross over the fixed line. They chose a spot where four Sherpas were at the belay, below the lead fixer, and moved slowly past them, taking care, Steck says, not to touch the ropes with their crampons or to kick chunks of ice onto the Sherpas working below. After Steck crossed the line, the leader of the fixing crew, Mingma Tenzing Sherpa, who was working 50 or so feet up the face, began yelling at Steck and banging on the ice with his ax. Mingma, a young man from the village of Phortse, then rappelled down toward Steck. Anticipating a collision, Steck raised his arms to cushion the blow and prevent himself from being knocked off the face. According to Steck, Mingma rappelled into him, then began yelling at him for having touched him. He accused Steck and his team of kicking ice chunks loose and injuring a member of his crew. Steck argued then, as he would later, that they hadn’t dislodged any ice, and that they’d been climbing well out of the way. He offered to help the crew finish fixing the ropes. This seemed to anger Mingma even more. It was then that Simone Moro came along and, seeing Mingma swinging his ice ax, began yelling at him, calling him machikne, which translates as “motherfucker.” The insult is graver in Nepali. Mingma instructed his crew to stop working. The Sherpas descended the face, leaving behind their equipment and an unfinished job. Steck and Moro, in a possibly misguided attempt at goodwill, stayed behind and finished fixing the lines themselves. The three Europeans then decided not to spend the night at Camp 3, but to head back down to Camp 2 and try to resolve the dispute.

  It isn’t unheard of for climbers to get into testy exchanges at high altitudes, where big egos meet thin air. One can reasonably argue over what happened on the Lhotse Face, and who deserves a greater share of the blame, even within a context of cultural, historical, and economic grievance. Many of the facts at hand—falling ice, who touched whom and in what order, the nature or validity of the prohibition against climbing that day—are in dispute, and yet may be of middling significance in light of what happened next.

  When the European climbers got back to their tents, at the upper edge of Camp 2, they were greeted by an American named Melissa Arnot, who’d been sharing their camp and who was attempting a fifth conquest of the summit, more than any other woman. She warned them that the Sherpas were very angry about the incident on the Lhotse Face and that the mood in camp was volatile. She left, but after a few moments she ran back to their tent to say that a large group of Sherpas had set out from the main part of camp. She said, “I think you should run.” Instead, they emerged from the tent in the hope of talking to the Sherpas. They then saw a mass of dozens of Sherpas appear on an overlooking ridge, many of them with their faces covered, some holding rocks. Steck surmised that he was in trouble.

  As the Sherpas converged on the tent, a New Zealander named Marty Schmidt ran up and tried to knock a rock out of a Sherpa’s hand. He was pushed and kicked, hit on the head with a rock, and punched in the eye. He too thre
w a punch. (The other climbers, outnumbered, chose to act submissively.) A Sherpa who had been on the fixing crew, and who was now at the head of the throng, rushed up and punched Steck in the face. Someone hit him with a rock; another threw an ice ax and crampons. Arnot got between the Sherpas and Steck, who scurried into another, smaller tent, his face bleeding. A rock bigger than a brick came through the top of the tent, and Steck crawled out. By now, Griffith and Moro had retreated a ways, and Steck went to join them. “I think this expedition is over,” he said.

  A group of Sherpas broke away from the pack and attacked Griffith, the photographer, kicking and punching him on the ground. A moment later, a Western guide ran up and scattered them, and Moro and Griffith ran away, but Steck went back into the tent with Schmidt. They were both bleeding. The crowd of Sherpas was outside. Melissa Arnot and the Western guide, along with a couple of Sherpas, their hands linked, blocked the way to the tent and tried to settle them down, while Steck and Schmidt cowered inside. After a while, the Sherpas demanded that Moro, who had grievously insulted their leader, appear before them, so someone fetched Moro and hustled him into the tent. Arnot told him to kneel and apologize to the Sherpas for his offensive words on the Lhotse Face, and got the Sherpas to promise that if he did so they would not attack him. Moro came out of the tent, and while he was on his knees a few Sherpas began punching and kicking him. Moro says that one swung at him with a penknife, but the blade caught the waist belt of a backpack. Moro’s protectors dragged him back into the tent. Amid the chaos, the Sherpas declared that Moro and Steck did not have a permit for the Lhotse Face. Eventually, word came from base camp that they did, and the Sherpas began to retreat. Someone told Steck and Moro, through the walls of the tent, that if they weren’t gone in an hour they’d all be killed.