I was checking out the latest edition of Summit, the British Mountaineering Council’s quarterly and I came across an article by Doug Scott, the famously tough, knighted British mountaineer who climbed the Southwest Face of Everest in 1975 but is best known for his crawl with two broken legs off Baintha Brakk (AKA the Ogre), a 23,901-foot peak in Pakistan.

In the essay, Scott looks at competition in climbing. Prompted by sport climbing’s possible inclusion in the 2020 Olympics, he starts by running down the history of alpine competition, a subset of the sport with a surprising history of accolades including Olympic medals (20 awarded so far for alpinism) and Piolets d’Or. Scott shows that competition is nothing new, but his thesis really is the question of whether there should be competition in climbing at all.