To Mount Triglav via the Olympics

If I had my way the Olympics would be restricted to sports for which it is the unquestioned pinnacle. It is no knock on basketball to wish it expelled from the Games. It’s just that everybody knows the world basketball championship is staged by the NBA each year, just as the Stanley Cup is hockey’s highest achievement. Which naturally brings me to Mount Triglav.

I know. That’s the point. Neither had I. But I have a profound respect for the people who show up in London or Rio or Tokyo for, say, the javelin toss. It’s incredibly hard. You have to train and sacrifice, combining endless repetition with scrupulous attention to technical details. And then once every four years instead of being alone in a field you’re in front of the whole world throwing a pointed stick a mind-boggling distance to raucous cheers and animated analysis. (By the way the 1912 Olympics had a variant where you had to throw the javelin with each hand and they added your scores. They should bring that back.) And while other track events, like swimming events, have all sorts of national and international competitions on their circuit, you still know it’s the guys and gals with Olympic gold who have scaled Parnassus.

Eh? Parnassus? When am I going to throw my javelin up this “Mount Triglav”, you cry? And the surprising answer is on August 26, 1778. You see, Mount Triglav is the highest mountain in Slovenia. Which again is like having the world record in the hammer toss. People go “Oh, that’s cool” and then they say “What is the hammer toss again?” or “Did you say Slovakia?” or some such and you have to explain the whole business.

For the record, Slovenia is not Slovakia nor is it Slavonia. It has been tossed around like a bone in a wolf pack by various powers over the years, but is now a parliamentary republic and UN member east of Italy, south of Austria, southwest of Hungary, north of Croatia and with a very small bit of Adriatic coast, having burst free of Yugoslavia in 1991 and joined NATO in 2004 and the EU. (Slavonia, by contrast, is part of Croatia, and Slovakia is the eastern bit of what used to be Czechoslovakia but never much enjoyed it.)

So back to Mount Triglav. Or to it. It’s 9,396 feet high, or 2,864 metres if you like that kind of thing, which doesn’t make it the Usain Bolt of central European mountains in the sense that the Alps has over 500 of them that exceed 3,000 metres, with Mont Blanc topping the list in both senses at 4,804. But 2,864 is pretty high if you’re trying to get up it.

Back in 1778 four guys were, specifically a surgeon, a chamois hunter, and two miners. I love the amateur spirit in which nobody went “Hey, guys, miners go down, a mountain is up, you know?” Indeed it was so amateur that records are uncertain; the most commonly cited report that lists those climbers was published 43 years later, and another account suggests it was two chamois hunters and one of their former students. I didn’t even know chamois hunters had students, among many other things I didn’t know about this business.

Including that before becoming the tallest mountain in Slovenia Mount Triglav had been the tallest mountain in Yugoslavia, another “tallest building in Witchita Kansas” sort of distinction with the added drawback that under Communism it was therefore considered a symbol of Yugoslavian “brotherhood and unity” which we learned all about in the 1990s as it descended into brutal ethnic war, just as we learned all about the other virtues of communism over the years.

For all that, and to some extent because of it, I think it’s very cool to have been among the first people to scale Mount Triglav, who by the standard account were Lovrenz Willomitzer or Willonitzer, Štefan Rožič, Luka Korošec and Matevž Kos, in case you can’t remember the Olympic hammer toss champion either.

Just kidding. There’s no such event. Oh wait. There is. And Poland’s Anita Włodarczyk won women’s gold at Rio by hurling a four kilogram sphere on a string 269 feet 11 ¾ inches, a new world record. It’s kind of a weird hammer and it wouldn’t do to try to drive a nail with it. But that’s a heck of a long distance to throw anything. Let’s hear it for Anita Włodarczyk. And Willomitzer or Willonitzer, Rožič, Korošec and Kos.

You don’t do things like climb Mount Triglav for fame or money. Not even enough fame that people are likely to be able to pronounce your name or even spell it. You do it because it is there. Like the javelin toss except even more dangerous.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Clinton got how much?

Here's the kind of story that inspires a mixture of rage and bewilderment. NBC reports that while Hillary Clinton has been lambasting "for-profit schools" including Trump University, "Over five years, former president Bill Clinton earned $17.6 million from the world's largest for-profit education company, Laureate Education, Inc. In his role as "honorary chancellor," Clinton has traveled the world on Laureate's behalf, extolling the virtues of the school." And doing very well indeed. We should be so, uh, lucky. Now look. I know a lot of people like Bill Clinton, focusing more on the charming than the rogue in his makeup. I am not among them. But a lot of people do.

I also realize that Bill Clinton is a champion schmoozer and makes good connections. He pulls in huge sums for the Clinton Foundation and by no means all of them were people hoping for favours from one H. Clinton when she was Secretary of State. But $17.6 million over five years is over $3.5 million a year. That's over $9,600 a day, even in a leap year. And it wasn't the only thing he was doing nor, indeed, the only thing he was doing that brought in vast sums. (For instance The Washington Post says he made $104.9 million giving 542 speeches between 2001 and 2013, an average of $193,542.44 per. And that he was paid $3.13 million in "consulting fees" in 2009 and 2010 by an investment firm whose boss's charity has given the Clinton Foundation millions more and who did at least try to contact Hillary Clinton for a favor when she was Secretary of State.)

What can anyone do for you on a part-time basis that's worth nearly $10,000 a day? Per customer? And what has he got to say that's worth 200 grand a pop, 45 times a year, for over a decade? I mean, we're out there asking people to support our documentaries and commentaries and other work like the "Ask the Professor" feature with, say, $5 a month, which is about 17 cents a day. That's less than one fifty-six-thousandth of Clinton's haul from Laureate Education alone. I'd need 3,226 people to answer that call to make as much in a year as Clinton does for an average speech of the sort he was giving nearly once a week.

I'm not saying I'm in the wrong business. But I am saying if this news bugs you as much as it bugs me, and if you think it's important to keep the voices that matter to you audible, please do try to find that 17 cents a day for us, and for other groups like Ezra Levant's The Rebel, Dave Reesor's Let's Do It Ourselves, Danny Hozack's Economic Education Association of Alberta (and yes, I'm professionally involved with two of them) and other similar outfits like the Fraser Institute, the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (who helped us enormously with our Fix the Constitution documentary project).

Unlike the Clintons, we're never going to get rich doing what we do. But that's kind of the point.

Ask the Professor, CFRA, Columns, Constitution, Documentaries, Done That, Economics, Education, Famous quotes, Government, History, It happened today, Magna Carta, Politics, Speeches, United StatesJohn Robson
Swimming slowly, steadily and rapidly

Pop quiz. When did someone first swim the English Channel without floaties? OK, you guessed it was August 25. But what year? The answer is surprising, to me anyway. It was 1875. And very much in the “Because it is there” spirit. Except not entirely in a good way.

The man who did it was Matthew Webb. A strong swimmer who went to sea at age 12 in 1860, and saved his own brother from drowning three years later, first winner of the Stanhope Gold Medal for bravery for trying to save a man overboard in mid-Atlantic, Webb was already captain of a steamship at age 25 when he read of a failed attempt to swim the channel and became, well, some say “inspired” but you could also say obsessed with doing it himself.

He quit his job, trained rigorously, and after being foiled by wind and waves on August 12 made another try on the 24th smeared in porpoise oil. Well, why not? (Porpoises might have an opinion, I suppose.)

I’m not taking anything away from Webb as a swimmer. Indeed he made the journey despite jellyfish stings and currents off Cap Griz Nez that kept him from getting to shore for an additional five hours. Finally he landed near Calais on the 25th, after 21 hours and 45 minutes in the water swimming an erratic course that nearly doubled the distance from 33.1 to 64 kilometres.

Yay. What an accomplishment. And he did become a hero. In quite a modern way, as he embarked on an impressive marketing career that made quitting his job look less reckless than it might first have seemed. He became a professional swimmer, which I didn’t even know they had then or now. He also endorsed such swim-related things as pottery, and wrote a book The Art of Swimming and had some matches named after him.

Yes, he became a celebrity. Which rather that the “modern” world is not so new after all. Whatever its virtues, or failings, novelty has less novelty to it than we think.

At this point Webb married and had two kids. But he didn’t live happily ever after.

Instead, he came up with the idea of swimming the Whirlpool Rapids below Niagara Falls. Many people told him he would surely die. Others told him they had no interest in funding this stunt. So he did it anyway, on July 24 1883… and died.

In 1909 one of his brothers put up a memorial in his birthplace of Dawley, Shropshire that says “Nothing great is easy.” After being hit by a truck a century later it was repaired, and he has a road and a school named for him in Dawley. And I admire Webb for swimming the Channel. But it was just plain dumb to try to swim those rapids even if he did make it surprisingly far before perishing.

It has been claimed that the image of Webb on Bryant and May matches inspired Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau look. But Clouseau would somehow have emerged from the rapids alive through dumb luck because the movie is made up. Webb didn’t because life is real. Apparently that too was becoming obscure by Victorian times.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - August 25, 2016

“The writing of history, as Goethe once noted, is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past... the writing of history liberates us from history.” Benedetto Croce, quoted in Hugh Thomas An Unfinished History of the World

Famous quotesJohn Robson