Ernest Hemingway once said that there are only three real sports, namely bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering. The rest are sheer games. With this opinion, the Nobel Prize winner for literature (“The Old Man and the Sea”) is not free from objections, because Reinhold Messner, for example, as a kind of unchosen Nobel Prize winner for mountaineering and for objections, at least does not want to see mountaineering as a sport at all, but more than a “conquest of the useless”.
In general, a conversation between Hemingway and Messner would be interesting because the old adventurer, that is Messner, once said in an interview that the sea is a “magnificent non-landscape” and that he had never vacationed there. Unfortunately, casual deep-sea fisherman Hemingway died before anyone was interested in Messner’s vacations.
Beyond all debates about sport and uselessness, the Medical University of Innsbruck for Psychiatry wants to have found out at least with the help of an online survey what mountaineering can develop into: an addiction. According to the tenor of the study, extreme mountaineers in particular often show clear signs of addiction – such as the urge to constantly increase the dose (vulgo: more and more difficult tours and summits) or withdrawal symptoms.
Of those affected, not even Messner should disagree. The Bavarian Huberbua Alexander, for example, did not point to a “state of periodic or chronic poisoning” – as the World Health Organization (WHO) once defined addiction – in his book “Der Berg in mir”. But at least to a state of periodic anxiety and chronic upward urges beyond all aspects of health. Even Hans Kammerlander, who tended towards philosophical considerations, gave his work the title “Mountain Addicted” more than 20 years ago. The subtitle: Climbing and descending in the death zone.
The study may only give the scientific touch to what the Kammerlanders and Huber brothers of this world always knew, but for occasional mountaineers and hikers, in short: mountain tourists, it means a significant upgrade. They are still allowed to climb the via ferratas and beginner’s routes, which are sometimes smiled at, sometimes despised by extremists, without any ambition, while the mountain addict who is keen on the summit has to go out into the great non-landscape for withdrawal, like the old man with Hemingway.