In 2007, a documentary about a 1981 game appeared. You wouldn't think a film about grown men trying to be the best in the world in a game from 1981 could be fascinating, but it is.
The center of the plot pf "The King of Kong" is that a player in a live "Donkey Kong" game scored what should have been a record...but then the record holder submitted a tape of himself achieving an even higher score. The record holder's score is accepted but he refuses to play live.
The story of Kilian Jornet reminds me a bit of that. Jornet is an extreme athlete - he can ski, he is the greatest ultrarunning athlete of a generation, and maybe ever. In 2017 he stunned the mountain climbing world by going up Everest twice - in a week. His fitness level is so high that it should not be all that surprising, he has famously done other extreme events shortly after extreme climbs.
But his Everest achievement has mobilized criticism in a way that Jornet wouldn't have if he had just documented his climb using the GoPro his equipment list says he had, if his GPS had not malfunctioned, a confluence of bad luck that can sometimes happen.
Of "The King of Kong" Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post (obviously not a fan) wrote, "the old saw about academia stands true for the insular world of video games: The competition is so vicious because the stakes are so low." I am not sure the last time Hornaday had visited a university when she wrote that but the average salary for a professor in the U.S. is 3X the average income of an entire American family, so the stakes may be low (the first to write about an incremental discovery in fruit flies is not going to change the world) (2) but the income is high.
In this kind of ski-mountaineering racing (skimo) and ultrarunning there is neither money nor high stakes. There is no Olympic stage and the world's best make less money than what I make as a freelance writer. Given the low stakes, there is no incentive to use performance-enhancing drugs, or blood doping, or to cheat.
Given the low stakes, would Jornet be motivated to do something difficult twice?
(1) Billy Mitchell's Guinness listing, and his certification as the world record holder, have been called into question by evidence he used emulated machines rather than original arcade versions.
(2) Yes, I know, all science is important, etc. Leave me out of your mentions with your clichés. 100% of scientists I know can find some funded part of academia they do not think is important.
