German Backtracks His Messner Claims

In the most ridiculous turn of events, “that German” (Eberhard Jurgalski) who a couple of weeks ago made the claim that many of the original 8,000 meter summit attempts during the pre-GPS days weren’t successful summit attempts and that these mountaineers should be stripped of their title claims. This lead to an obvious ‘shitstorm’ as the Germans like to call it (Yes, the Germans adopted the original English language word ‘shitstorm’ to describe just that. They probably liked it because it’s a compound word).

Now mere days later he offers an update to try to avoid being the most hated man in Alpinism:

German press did not correctly translate the English word “legacy” used in the original press release, but wrongly translated it to “outdated” (in German), and that is far from what it was meant. The wrong translation appeared later in the international press too. Well, actually it should have been clear that neither 8000ers.com nor Guinness wanted – or could – delete those titles.

So he blames the incident on a language translation mistake, first by the German press and then later by the Guinness Book of World Records. Well, let me translate his comments for you back in plain English:

“Oh shit, I fell in love a bit too much with my own little number game, forgot the people behind it and ended up stirring up a huge shitstorm. Now I’m afraid of getting called out and becoming irrelevant and would like to correct my mistake by blaming everyone but myself for it. Please make all these things go back to normal so I can go back to playing with my numbers.”