Bear Grylls…….the hype starts to implode

by Mick Ryan Etonian, former SAS man (or maybe just a TA man) and Everest summiteer Bear Grylls is a best selling author, motivational speaker and presenter of the US Discovery Channel´s ´Man Vs Wild´ TV Series and Channel Four´s TV Series: ´Born Survivor.´ Recently Bear claimed to have broke a world record by flying a powered paraglider above Everest! This is now in doubt as mounteverest.net reports (link to report) “With the help of Discovery´s media apparatus, the news quickly spread around the world – with no fact checks done. Only pictures of clouds were presented and no technical specs were made available. When ExWeb approached Grylls´ for proof; he replied they would be shown on TV. Later, he told Cooper that his instruments froze. And finally that he only did it for charity anyway.” UKClimbing.com´s Tom Briggs also reports,”I know people who were in base camp the day he flew over Dingboche and the joke was “why didn´t he do it over Surrey?!” Now the Daily Mail reports that: “To viewers of his TV series, Bear Grylls is the daredevil adventurer who catapults himself into world´s worst ´hellholes´ and then survives on his wits alone. In one episode filmed in California´s Sierra Nevada mountains he was shown biting off the head of a snake for breakfast and boasting that he was living on ´just a water bottle, a cup and a flint for making fire´. Viewers were not told that he was actually spending some nights in the Pines Resort hotel at Bass Lake, where the rooms have Internet access and is advertised as ´a cosy getaway for families´ complete with blueberry pancakes for breakfast. In another episode when Grylls declared he was a ´real life Robinson Crusoe´ stuck on a desert island, he was actually on an outlying part of the Hawaiian archipelago and retired to a motel at nightfall.” You can read the Dail Mail report here

QuelleUKClimbing