"Cheating" Mount Everest?

In 1953, Norgay and Hillary became the first people to climb Everest. It took them two months.

A few weeks ago (May 21st 2025), four British former special forces soldiers set a new record. Climbing Everest in under five days.

Just how did they climb the mountain in roughly 10% of the time? Technology. As a result, it’s raised all kinds of questions about what climbers should be “allowed” to do.

Through a combination of conditioning themselves in hypoxic tents for months beforehand, and a one-off clinical dose of xenon gas, they’ve ruffled the feathers of tourist boards, climbing enthusiasts and scientists alike.

Why They Work

While the xenon gas sounds the most exciting, their hypoxic tent conditioning likely provided the greatest gains. Both of these interventions are chosen to increase the production of erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that “stimulate[s] the bone marrow to increase its production of red blood cells.” Red blood cells carry oxygen. The higher the altitude, the less oxygen available per breath. 

The acclimatisation process–training your body to deal with higher altitudes–is what takes up so much time on Everest. If you can train yourself from home for hundreds of hours with a hypoxic tent before you get to Nepal, you’re going to save a lot of time when you get there.

Once you reach 8,000M above sea level, you reach what’s optimistically called the death zone. Without supplementary oxygen, you’re going to die. The first climbers in 1953 took extra oxygen with them. To date, only 3% of people who have reached the summit of Everest have done so without it.

The xenon gas is what’s drawing headlines because it sounds like some kind of supervillain weapon. There’s evidence that shows it enhances cognition under low oxygen pressure, blunts inflammation and reduces oxidative stress too. But the reason it was banned by WADA in 2014 as a performance-enhancing agent is due to its EPO-enhancing properties. Scientists state they “haven’t seen any data suggesting that’s true.”

Well… after the British crew inhaled it two weeks before their attempt and blasted all expectations, that’s a good starting point.

What’s The Beef?

It boils down to not being “in the spirit” of Everest--that it’s cheating in some way. But cheating whom? The mountain? Ourselves?

There’s no federation, prize money or podium here. People climb Everest for existential reasons (or for clout) more than from a competitive angle. There are no medals.

The Sherpas who perform most of the heavy lifting have laid “miles of fixed ropes” for climbers to follow. 97% of people use supplementary oxygen. Undoubtedly, given that it costs around £40,000 on average for a person to climb Everest, these people are adorned with GPS phones and ultra-light crampons and jackets made from mammoth fur.

But sleeping in a tent and huffing some gas under scientific supervision is against the spirit?

You can climb a mountain (that’s killed 340 people) for leisure. But don’t try to make it easier, that’s not very gentlemanly.

Technology v Tradition

The unease towards xenon and hypoxic tents reflects a broader discomfort with technological advancement, particularly if it enhances performance.

It feels like another example of a John Henryism. Based on an American myth whereby, in the 1870s, a remarkably strong and enduring worker beat a mechanical steam drill in the closing seconds of the race. Moments after the contest ended, he dropped dead from total exhaustion.

Why die proving your body can do what technology can do better?

In mountaineering and Everest particularly, there are so many things that can kill you. Altitude sickness, frostbite, snowstorms, falls… add anything I’ve forgotten. By spending less time on the mountain, there’s less overcrowding, waste and risk. This innovative approach could actually make commercial climbs safer.

Whether the Nepalese allow it or not is yet to be seen, but the moral panic around “cheating” when, by all accounts, these advances seemingly make climbing less fatal and miserable, says more about us than it does the mountain.

The Real Spirit

If the goal is the summit and someone finds a smarter way to get there, why stop them? We use tech that helps us write/train/cook/live better every single day. Why draw a line in the snow when it comes to climbing?

Defining something solely by how hard it is, rather than what it provides us, is not how progress is made. The old world isn’t coming back.

We each have our own mountain to climb. It’s entirely up to us how we choose to get to the top, so long as we’re not pushing anyone else down along the way.

Using new tools is a way to adapt. In a world that moves as fast as ours, that might be the most important edge of all.