[dropcap style=”I” size=”4″]I[/dropcap]t took nearly a century, two years of planning, and a swashbuckling British adventurer, but on Thursday night, an 88-year-old promise was finally fulfilled when a piece of history from Toronto reached the peak of Mount Everest.
On Thursday the celebrated British climber Kenton Cool reached the summit of the world’s highest mountain. It was a jubilant moment in a somber week that saw four climbers die on Everest’s slopes.
For Cool, 38, it was his 10th trip up the Himalayan mountain, a new British record. But the real milestone was the gold Olympic medal he hung from his neck — something that was 88 years late in its journey to Mount Everest’s peak.
At the 1924 Olympic Games, a gold medal for “alpinisme” was awarded to a team of mountaineers from the 1922 British Everest expedition. The team was unsuccessful — they came just 500 metres short of the summit — but the “heroic failure” was celebrated as the world’s first serious attempt to scale Mount Everest.
Among the climbers was British physician Arthur Wakefield, who lived in Canada for several years. He never spoke of his Olympic accolade to his family, however, nor did he tell them about the public pledge made at the medal ceremony: that at the next Mount Everest expedition, one of the medals would be taken to the peak.
In fact, the next expedition ended in calamity, with the disappearance of famed climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. The pledge was quickly forgotten.
Wakefield’s grandson, Charles Wakefield from Toronto, Canada, knew nothing of the pledge until February, when he received an unexpected phone call. It was Kenton Cool, who told him about the long-forgotten promise.
As it turned out, Cool and his friend, Richard Robinson, had been working for two years to research the pledge and track down the medals. An acquaintance led them to Wakefield, who only learned of the medal’s existence in 2007, when he inherited it from his father.
In March, Cool asked if he could borrow the medal and fulfill the pledge once and for all. “Absolutely,” Wakefield said.
Cool immediately flew to Toronto and picked it up from Wakefield’s home near St. Clair Ave. and Avenue Rd. There was no guarantee the medal would ever come home, but when Cool offered to insure the precious family heirloom, Wakefield would hear nothing of it.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, this journey is a romantic journey.’ And there is nothing romantic about insurance,” Wakefield said.
Today, thanks to Cool, Arthur Wakefield’s medal has finally accomplished what he failed to in 1922: reach the summit of the world.
“I believe my grandfather was smiling at his medal climbing up the top,” Wakefield said.
Source: Toronto Star