Seoul, April 28: South Korean media hailed one of the country’s climbers on Wednesday after she claimed to have become the first woman to scale the world’s 14 highest peaks, ignoring controversy surrounding her bid.
All major newspapers ran a front page photo of Oh Eun-Sun holding a national flag at the snow-covered summit of the 8,091-metre (26,545-foot) Annapurna in Nepal.
Oh’s claim to be the first female climber to have conquered all the world’s mountains over 8,000 metres is under scrutiny, however.
Last week her 2009 ascent of Mount Kanchenjunga on the Nepal-Tibet border was thrown into doubt when a leading authority on Himalayan mountaineering said fellow climbers had expressed scepticism about the climb.
In South Korea, there were no such reservations.
“Your successful ascent (of all the eight-thousanders) was a process of human victory that underscores the meaning of challenge,” President Lee Myung-Bak told Oh in a congratulatory message late Tuesday.
“You are really admirable,” Lee said, adding the successful ascent brought the spirit of challenge back not only to alpinists but to all South Koreans.
The best-selling Chosun Ilbo newspaper said Oh’s feat “proudly shows the spirit of Korean climbers and Korean women’s courage, patience and strength”.
Its headline read in part: “Iron lady 154 centimetres tall becomes a ‘giant’ over 8,000 metres”.
Other papers carried pages of similar coverage, with little or no mention of the dispute about the 44-year-old’s record.
Mountaineering expert Elizabeth Hawley said in Kathmandu that Oh’s ascent of Kanchenjunga would be considered “disputed”.
She said fellow mountaineers, including Oh’s chief rival for the record Edurne Pasaban, had questioned whether she actually made it to the top.
“I’ll be waiting to meet her when she gets back to hear her version of what she has to say about Kanchenjunga,” Hawley told AFP Tuesday after hearing of Oh’s ascent of Annapurna.
Pasaban, 36, conquered Annapurna earlier this month, becoming the first Spanish woman ever to do so and leaving her with just one more mountain to scale.
Pasaban is on her way to Tibet, where she will attempt to climb Shisha Pangma — the smallest of the 14 peaks at 8,027 metres.
Pasaban said she still doubts that Oh reached the top of Kanchenjunga.
“It is a doubt which we already had last year, because when she climbed Kanchenjunga we were already there and we climbed it after her. Our doubts emerged when she presented some photos, and other climbers shared them,” she told public radio from Shisha Pangma.
The picture provided by Oh shows her standing on a bare rock but those taken by Pasaban’s team shows them standing on snow.
“The confirmation came this year while at the base camp at Annapurna when I met with the Sherpas who climbed with her and they confirmed that they did not reach the peak of Annapurna,” said Pasaban.
“When she returns to Kathmandu she will have to prove it, she will be questioned and we will see what happens.”
Oh has previously dismissed the doubts as groundless.
“I can say that I have stood at the summit of Mount Kanchenjunga,” she told a press conference in Seoul late last year.
“It was bad weather. Three sherpas told me that I reached the top and one of them took the picture.”
Just 18 people have previously made it to the top of the 14 eight-thousanders, which are all in Asia’s Himalaya and Karakoram ranges, since Italian climber Reinhold Messner became the first person to do achieve the feat in 1986.
—Agencies