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National Geographic Exposé Slams Colin O’Brady Antarctic ‘Crossing’

By Jeff Moag | February 14, 2020

Professional triathlete-turned-adventurer Colin O’Brady captured the public’s imagination in 2018 when he skied solo across 932 miles of Antarctica in 54 days and beat a rival explorer to the prize he immodestly termed The Impossible First. A little more than a year later, his book of the same title is a New York Times bestseller. He’s been featured on the cover of Outside magazine, appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and his TEDx talk has racked up more than 1.5 million views. But you’re hearing about him now thanks to journalist Aaron Teasdale’s devastating exposé of the exaggerations, omissions, and disputed claims that helped propel him to fame.

O’Brady claimed to be the first person ever to cross Antarctica alone, unsupported, and unassisted—a collection of qualifiers that, in Teasdale’s careful language, “do not withstand scrutiny.” Even the claim that he crossed Antarctica relies on definitional sleight-of-hand. O’Brady started and ended hundreds of miles from water, and he crossed at the narrowest distance possible. O’Brady’s route was less than half the mileage Norwegian Børge Ousland covered in the first human-powered crossing of the continent from November 1996 to January 1997—an accomplishment O’Brady dismisses as assisted because the Norwegian occasionally used a kite, without disclosing that he himself traveled hundreds of miles on a marked and graded ice road.

The pushback from the exploration community was swift and unequivocal. The day after O’Brady finished, veteran polar guide Eric Phillips gave his assessment of the use of the graded road, known as the tractor route and formally called the South Pole Overland Traverse (SPoT), to ExploresWeb. “It is a highway,” he said, which “more than doubles someone’s speed and negates the need for navigation. An expedition cannot be classed as unassisted if someone is skiing on a road.” A few days later, Antarctic explorer Damien Gildea published a powerful rebuke of O’Brady’s claims, stating flatly that O’Brady “had neither crossed the continent nor been unsupported.”

This is a small segment of the article exposing Colin’s disingenuous account of his supposed crossing of Antarctica.

When it was going on, I said big deal and a number of my readers were angry with me for my position. Now we know the truth. Go to this web site to read the whole story.

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