Part One

On March 25, 2021, a week before his 41st birthday, Adrian Nel woke at dawn on the floor of his hotel room in Palma, northern Mozambique, and, seized by a sudden premonition, texted his wife, Janik Armstrong, at their home in Durban, South Africa.

Janik im still alive here but shit is
going wild. We have been under
attack since yesterday. We are
stuck for the moment at the
amarula. We have a small amount
of wifi that connects sometimes. I
will update you if anything changes
and we have a plan for evac.
My babes i love love love you and
the kids forever. Please let them
know that everyday if i dont make
it out here.Ìę 05:32

When Janik checked her phone an hour later, she lost it.

Adi, don’t say that!!!Ìę 06:47
You scaring me to deathÌę 06:47
Please don’t talk like thatÌę 06:48
Love you so so much 06:51

But Adi couldn’t stop. “I love you to death,” he replied. Then, later: “I love you guys so much. Tell the kids I love them every day.”

Janik wanted more information. She also wanted Adi to be there to love her in life, and to be able to tell the kids himself that he loved them every day. Calmly, evenly, she told her husband to “stop fucking talking like that” or she would “freak the fuck out.” One of the things Janik loved about Adi was that he could always make a plan. He needed to figure this one out, too. “You have to promise me that you’ll come home safely,” she wrote.

Adi’s next messages indicated that he was trying to do as he was asked. At 8 A.M., he wrote that a few small helicopters were flying around the Amarula Lodge, where he was holed up with around 180 others, and “clearing some militants away.” At 11 A.M., he reported talk of a rescue in armored troop carriers belonging to an army battalion stationed 30 minutes away. Around 1 P.M., Adi said that there was a new plan: “We might receive some private security at some point today.” Just after 2 P.M., he hinted that he might have good news soon. “The choppers came and blew some shit up at 13:00. To clear a route for us to escape.”

When Adi stopped texting shortly afterward, Janik wasn’t unduly worried. She knew that the insurgents had knocked out Palma’s single cell tower, Wi-Fi was patchy, and Adi’s phone battery was low. Plus, she was being forwarded messages from other contractors at the Amarula who had satellite phones, and they were saying that everyone was fine and busy working on a way out.

So Janik resigned herself to waiting. She kept her phone close that afternoon and into the evening, and by her bed that night. She checked it when she woke up, and at breakfast, and on the school run, and all day at work at a travel agency. Finally, on the way home, when she hadn’t heard from Adi in 27 hours, Janik found herself stuck in traffic, staring at a long line of cars trying to get home, and without really thinking, she pulled onto the shoulder and texted. “I love you, I love you, I love you with all my heart ,” she wrote. “You can do this.”

It was 5:08 P.M. on March 26. The sun would set in Palma in another 17 minutes. When Janik checked her phone later, a double tick indicated that her message had been received.

The post “I’m Still Alive but Sh*t Is Getting Wild”: Inside the Siege of the Amarula appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Part One

Heading east across Iraqi Kurdistan toward the and the border with Iran, we pass from a land of sand and dust into the green prairies of Mesopotamia. For an hour, we cross fields of barley and watermelons, and orchards of figs and pomegranates. Reaching the foothills, we follow a tumbling cloud of swifts, like a hundred tiny crossbows, into a canyon that plunges to the heart of the massif. After a while, the gorge arrives at a natural rock amphitheater enclosing the small frontier town of Tawella. And there, saddling his mules in front of a warehouse just off the bazaar, I find an old highlander in a jacket, cummerbund, baggy trousers, dress shirt, and dress shoes who agrees to tell me about the smuggling.

The boxes his four grown sons are humping from the warehouse are 70-pound air conditioners, the man says. They’re wrapping them in gray and orange plastic sacks to keep out the rain and dust, then strapping them four at a time to the mules. Once the animals are loaded, his boys will lead them up a zigzag out of Tawella’s ravine. Avoiding border patrols and 40-year-old mines left over from the Iran-Iraq War, they will slip through terraces of walnuts and almonds, then copses of wild oaks and pistachios. Above that will come crevices and caves where Neolithic families once lived, now home to bears, eagles, wolves, and leopards. Above the tree line, the men will risk open ground—first thistly yellow-grass hillside, then shale, then scree. After several hours and 2,000 feet of climbing, they’ll reach a patch of bare earth beneath the snowy peaks that the map on their phones will identify as the point where Iraq meets Iran. This is the bargah, where Iraqi Kurds hand off their sacks to Iranian Kurds known as kolbars, after the Kurdish for “back” (kol) and “load” (bar). Evading their own patrols and mines, the kolbars will lug the loads five hours down their side of the mountain to the town of Nowsud. There they will stack them onto trucks, to be driven through the night to Tehran, arriving in time for the morning market.

The smuggling has its roots in the clumsiness of rulers who for hundreds of years have taken the thousand-mile Zagros range as the boundary between Arabia and Persia but ignored how Kurds live on both sides. Petty smuggling between cousins has existed here forever. But trade soared after 1991, when the U.S., the UK, and France created a no-fly zone to the west of the mountains to protect Iraqi Kurds from gas attacks by Saddam Hussein. The new area became Iraqi Kur­distan, an autonomous enclave of five million that today is stable, open for trade, and tolerant of alcohol and sexual freedom. That liberation contrasts with the restricted lives of 84 million Iranians to the east—­including eight million Iranian Kurds—who are cut off from the world by and Iran’s own prohibitive taxes and inhibited by strict laws against alcohol and sex. The chief effect of this juxtaposition, the old man says, has been to ensure that “the Iranians want everything” that the Iraqi Kurds have.

So it seems. Walking around Tawella, I find hundreds of houses built to the same unique design: comfortable villas with balconies and roof gardens on the first floor, overlooking cavernous warehouses at street level. Inside the stockrooms, I spy more air conditioners, plus towering stacks of washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, boxes of tea, cigarettes, pet food, beer, whisky, and lingerie—the secret shopping list of an entire nation. The old man says that on busy days the line of men and mules snaking up the hills can be a mile long. On the Iranian side, where discrimination against Kurds leaves them few alternatives to kolbar work, it can be several miles long.

And that’s just Tawella. Along the Zagros lie hundreds of villages and towns devoted to high-altitude smuggling. The estimates that around 300,000 smugglers per year are humping appliances and contraband over these 14,000-foot peaks, mostly for about $15 per load, or $20 to $25 for Iranian kolbars desperate enough to cross the border and make the entire journey themselves. The Iranian parliament puts the value of all that trafficking at $25 billion, roughly the same as Iraqi Kurdistan’s GDP, or the annual trade . Later, looking at satellite images of wide, dusty mountain paths, I realize that this is smuggling you can see from space.

The scale of the business ensures its terrible human cost. Iraq’s police largely tolerate it, apparently appreciative of the legal precision of Iraqi Kurds who, since most never set foot in Iran, are not technically breaking the law. It’s a different story in Iran. Last year its border guards shot dead 43 kolbars and injured 151, while arresting untold numbers. (Iran does not publish statistics on kolbar detentions, but the frequency with which kolbars report them suggests thousands each year.) Those figures were down from 55 and 142, respectively, in 2019, and 71 and 160 in 2018. The violence provides more evidence of Iran’s anti-Kurdish racism. It also has a lethal secondary effect: persuading kolbars trying to dodge patrols to set out in poor weather or on dangerous routes, leading to dozens more deaths and hundreds more injuries as they fall from steep paths or drown under loads or step on land mines or perish in snowstorms, such as the five young Kurdish Iranians this past January.

To Western ears, a town where old men dress up to go smuggling, in a mountain range called the Zagros, in an imaginary country called Kurdistan, which historians say doubles as an approximation for Eden, can all sound a little unreal. To place this phenomenon in more familiar context, then: several times more people die in the Zagros in a typical year than are killed on all 14 eight-­thousand-meter peaks in the Himalayas and Karakoram combined.

The difference between dying in the mountains for glory and dying there for twenty bucks a day should give any climber pause. Just as arresting: the realization that the on which the reputations of a K2, a Denali, or an Eiger are built are nothing next to a single season in the Zagros. Half the elevation of the Himalayas, all but unknown to the outside world, almost never summited, these are by far the deadliest mountains on earth.

The post The World’s Most Dangerous Mountains appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

Dressel was doing much to stoke the rebellion. A year earlier he’d won six golds and two silvers at the World Championships in Kwangju, South Korea, to match Michael Phelps’s all-time record of eight golds at a single Olympics. When the pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dressel came to Budapest, where during six weeks of racing he broke four world records in seven days. That, plus five more world records set by other swimmers in Hungary, suddenly made the league, not the Games, the place where sports history was being made. That in turn made Dressel and his left-arm sleeve tattoo the icons of an Olympic sport fast evolving beyond the Olympics.

Dressel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had built his entire existence around the Games. “My whole life,” he said, “you hear swimming, you hear track, you hear gymnastics, you think Olympics.” But in the league, he said, he had discovered “what swimming should be.”

Dressel’s dilemma had its roots in an old paradox. In public, the mythology of the Games—the Olympic ideal—makes them the world’s most prestigious tournament. Backstage, however, athletes despise the old men who run them, for their long and dismal history of corruption, and for allowing and even profiting from the financial, sexual, and pharmacological abuse of Olympians. The establishment’s latest ignominy concerned the coronavirus. Last March, epidemiologists said they couldn’t imagine a better superspreader event than gathering together several million people from every country on earth, then dispersing them back across the planet two weeks later. The International Olympic Committee’s response—that it couldn’t imagine the Games any other way—made clear that it valued schedules and bottom lines above global health. After weeks of refusing to back down, it agreed to a only and Australia and Britain threatened to do the same.

But for once, the IOC’s arrogance had cost it. Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking. By arranging COVID-safe bubbles or going virtual, most major competitions in track and field, basketball, soccer, cycling, tennis, and marathon running went ahead, prompting a string of editorials wondering if the Games were even necessary. “Cancel. The. Olympics,” .

Leading the charge was the ISL. It’s not often that someone sets up a new Champions League. But over nine months in 2019, Ukrainian multimillionaire Konstantin Grigorishin did just that. At 55, Grigorishin has a trim physique and a shaved head that suggest a muscular efficiency; in another life as a Soviet cosmologist, he spent his days imagining new galaxies. Grigorishin’s vision of a better world for swimming involved a professional league of city-based teams made up of elite athletes. He argued that waiting four years for a big race didn’t celebrate the sport so much as stifle it, and pointed up another Olympic conundrum: why the world’s most popular participatory sports—running and swimming—were among its more obscure spectator ones. His competition would be in which swimmers faced off in weekly meets. To ensure that it was free of doping, any violation would mean a lifetime ban. Unlike the Olympics, the league would pay its athletes: Grigorishin pledged a 50 percent share of revenues. His big promise to swimmers was that by combining continuous competition with arena-rock production, he would make them stars. The ISL’s first season, in 2019—seven meets between eight teams from the U.S. and Europe, which drew stadium crowds and an online audience of millions—proved that he was onto something. The second season—expanded to ten teams, and staged in a bubble thrown around 300 swimmers, 1,000 support staff, and three adjacent hotels and a natatorium on the river in Budapest—replaced the Olympics as the biggest sporting event of 2020.

Dressel shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s really hard for me to say, ‘Yeah, Budapest is how it’s going to be,’” he said. “I don’t know if it’s up to me. I don’t know what even I wish it to be.” Something in Dressel’s tone suggested that he was less spooked by the idea of Olympic decline than by talking about it out loud. We spoke about other subjects for a while: growing up in a family of swimmers, how he might have been a wide receiver, the beauty and spirituality of water. Then Dressel said: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with any sport. You’ve got to have people run the meets. And, you know, there might be some things that maybe I don’t want to know about.”

Which people? What things?

The post The Plot to Kill the Olympics appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

Dressel was doing much to stoke the rebellion. A year earlier he’d won six golds and two silvers at the World Championships in Kwangju, South Korea, to match Michael Phelps’s all-time record of eight golds at a single Olympics. When the pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dressel came to Budapest, where during six weeks of racing he broke four world records in seven days. That, plus five more world records set by other swimmers in Hungary, suddenly made the league, not the Games, the place where sports history was being made. That in turn made Dressel and his left-arm sleeve tattoo the icons of an Olympic sport fast evolving beyond the Olympics.

Dressel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had built his entire existence around the Games. “My whole life,” he said, “you hear swimming, you hear track, you hear gymnastics, you think Olympics.” But in the league, he said, he had discovered “what swimming should be.”

Dressel’s dilemma had its roots in an old paradox. In public, the mythology of the Games—the Olympic ideal—makes them the world’s most prestigious tournament. Backstage, however, athletes despise the old men who run them, for their long and dismal history of corruption, and for allowing and even profiting from the financial, sexual, and pharmacological abuse of Olympians. The establishment’s latest ignominy concerned the coronavirus. Last March, epidemiologists said they couldn’t imagine a better superspreader event than gathering together several million people from every country on earth, then dispersing them back across the planet two weeks later. The International Olympic Committee’s response—that it couldn’t imagine the Games any other way—made clear that it valued schedules and bottom lines above global health. After weeks of refusing to back down, it agreed to a only and Australia and Britain threatened to do the same.

But for once, the IOC’s arrogance had cost it. Just as the pandemic inspired political and social change the world over, so, during the course of 2020, did many of the bigger Olympic sports experience a quiet remaking. By arranging COVID-safe bubbles or going virtual, most major competitions in track and field, basketball, soccer, cycling, tennis, and marathon running went ahead, prompting a string of editorials wondering if the Games were even necessary. “Cancel. The. Olympics,” .

Leading the charge was the ISL. It’s not often that someone sets up a new Champions League. But over nine months in 2019, Ukrainian multimillionaire Konstantin Grigorishin did just that. At 55, Grigorishin has a trim physique and a shaved head that suggest a muscular efficiency; in another life as a Soviet cosmologist, he spent his days imagining new galaxies. Grigorishin’s vision of a better world for swimming involved a professional league of city-based teams made up of elite athletes. He argued that waiting four years for a big race didn’t celebrate the sport so much as stifle it, and pointed up another Olympic conundrum: why the world’s most popular participatory sports—running and swimming—were among its more obscure spectator ones. His competition would be in which swimmers faced off in weekly meets. To ensure that it was free of doping, any violation would mean a lifetime ban. Unlike the Olympics, the league would pay its athletes: Grigorishin pledged a 50 percent share of revenues. His big promise to swimmers was that by combining continuous competition with arena-rock production, he would make them stars. The ISL’s first season, in 2019—seven meets between eight teams from the U.S. and Europe, which drew stadium crowds and an online audience of millions—proved that he was onto something. The second season—expanded to ten teams, and staged in a bubble thrown around 300 swimmers, 1,000 support staff, and three adjacent hotels and a natatorium on the river in Budapest—replaced the Olympics as the biggest sporting event of 2020.

Dressel shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s really hard for me to say, ‘Yeah, Budapest is how it’s going to be,’” he said. “I don’t know if it’s up to me. I don’t know what even I wish it to be.” Something in Dressel’s tone suggested that he was less spooked by the idea of Olympic decline than by talking about it out loud. We spoke about other subjects for a while: growing up in a family of swimmers, how he might have been a wide receiver, the beauty and spirituality of water. Then Dressel said: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of baggage that comes with any sport. You’ve got to have people run the meets. And, you know, there might be some things that maybe I don’t want to know about.”

Which people? What things?

The post The Plot to Kill the Olympics appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Part One

Later, everyone who saw White Island erupt would remark on how quiet it was, how magnificent, and how swift. At 2:10 P.M., nothing. At 2:11, a two-mile-high tower of steam. Fifty miles away on New Zealand’s North Island, a search and rescue helicopter crew returning to base watched, astonished, as a colossal mushroom unfurled on the horizon. “Oh, my God!” shouted the pilot. “We’ve just seen a volcano erupt!” Then, a shudder of dread. It was December 9, the summer season. The island would be packed with day-trippers.

Just inland from the island’s rocky southern beach, with four middle-aged German clients he had brought in by chopper an hour earlier, pilot Brian Depauw glanced around to see a mammoth cumulus silently fill the sky behind him, then “go vertical.” Off the island’s east coast, on the Phoenix with a few dozen other tourists, Brazilian Allessandro Kauffmann captured the moment . The clip shows a vast ball of cloud roll out of the crater, then, soundlessly and impossibly fast, swallow the island. The initial eruption is followed moments later by a second blast, a dark gray avalanche that shoots out horizontally, directly toward the camera. The color and texture indicate a mix of rock, ash, and acid gas, a superheated pyroclastic flow. Its focused direction suggests that the crater amphitheater, with its high sides and single exit through a collapsed southern wall, has acted like a cannon: the explosion bounced off the caldera’s back and sides and is barrelling out the opening. The force of the wave is awesome. “Huge smoke coming very quickly 
 getting massive so fast,” was how Kauffmann’s wife, Aline, .

Paul Kingi, crewing on the Phoenix, saw the blast drop down onto the sea and hurtle toward his boat. As he yelled at everyone to get inside, the boat’s skipper gunned south, then made a wide curve around to the west and north, sidestepping the ash cloud like a matador executing a pass.

In Crater Bay on the Phoenix’s sister ship, the Te Puia Whakaari, captain David Plews had no such chance. He was anchored in the path of a 60-mile-per-hour gas and rock tsunami. Already engulfed, or about to be, were his 42 passengers. Deep inside the crater, guide Hayden Marshall-Inman’s group of 21 had disappeared. Kelsey Waghorn’s group of 21, near the shore, were seconds from following them. Plews grabbed the ship’s radio. “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” he shouted.

On land, Depauw heard the cries and saw what was about to happen. “Jump into the water!” he screamed at his guests. Depauw ran to the water’s edge and leapt. Two clients followed. The other two were unable to make the water in time. Depauw took a lungful of air as the black fog flew toward him. This is it, he thought. There’s no surviving this. Then he ducked.

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On December 16, aÌęSan Francisco court ruled that the (FINA), the body based in Lausanne, Switzerland,Ìęthat governs Olympic swimming, has to answer toÌęallegations that it has been operating an illegal monopoly, in part by financially punishing athletes who want to compete in events that it doesn’t recognize or control.

The judgment came after a year of hearings in a suit jointly filed by the (ISL), a new global swimming competition, and three champion swimmers pursuing a class-action suit against FINA, a subsidiary of the (IOC). The swimmers are U.S. Olympic butterflyer Tom Shields, U.S. world-champion individual-medley swimmer Michael Andrew, and multiple gold medalistÌęKatinka HosszĂș, from Hungary.

Denying FINA’s attempt to dismiss the case and keep sealed internal communications disclosed during the discovery process, San Francisco District Court magistrate judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled that, in their attempt to show that FINA was operating “a global anti-trust conspiracy
 the plaintiffs have satisfied their burden of making a prima facie” case. The court will hold an initial case-management conference toÌędetermine theÌęnext stepsÌęin mid-January 2020.

ISL founder and owner Konstantin Grigorishin, who has accused the Olympic establishment of violating European and U.S. antitrust law, said the decision will have wide-rangingÌęramifications. Shields, Andrew, and HosszĂș, he said, could now be joined by thousands of other elite swimmers in suing FINA for compensation for earnings they lostÌędue to FINA’s ban on participation in commercial, non-Olympic events. In addition, Grigorishin said, “We can also apply this judgment to all Olympic sports and the IOC.”

If the plaintiffs ultimately prevail,Ìęthis case and another legal precedent—in 2017, there was a similar ruling in Europe involving speed skaters and the International Skating Union—could open the way to American and European commercial operators who, before now, have been effectively barred from promoting Olympic sports.

Alex Haffner, a sports-law specialist in London who has followed the case closely, cautioned that a finding that FINA hasÌęa case to answer was not a final verdict. But, he added,Ìę“It is clear that FINA now faces a very significant battle to justify the stance taken to the International Swimming League. This in turn raises the further possibility that the substantiveÌęhearing—if matters proceed to that stage—will set an important precedent.”

A spokesman who was reached for commentÌęat the IOC’s offices in Lausanne referred the matter to FINA, but at press time, FINA had not responded to an interview request.

The broader commercialization of Olympic sports, should it happen, would spell an end to the IOC’s insistence that participants be amateurs for the duration of the Games. While this is no great sacrifice for professionals playing tennis, soccer, and basketball—who earn millions during a typical career—the IOC’s domination of swimming and track and field, and its threat to outlaw any competitions it sees as a rival, have left athletes and swimmers relatively impoverished.

During this dispute, the IOC has . But in an era when the governing body makes $5.7Ìębillion from sponsorship and television, as it did in the four-year cycle leading up to the Rio Games in 2016, swimmers and runners have complained that they’re being exploited. While the IOC’s accounts show that officials spend millions a year on travel expenses, many athletes struggle to finance their training and Olympic appearances. Some swimmers have even sold their medals to stay in the sport.

Monday’s judgment follows decades of athletes’ and coaches’ frustration with the IOC’s rule. The modern Olympics are often associated with corruption, on and off the track, because of a series of scandals involving doping, bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering, particularly at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, the 2016 Rio Games and, more recently, the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics in July and August next year.

Such associationsÌęand the multibillion-dollar sport and transport infrastructure that the IOC insists be created anew for every Olympics haveÌęleft the IOC struggling to find candidates prepared to host the event. The Olympic TV audience is also , a symptom, critics say, of the IOC’s format of parades, podiums, and long speeches by elderly officials.

The San Francisco ruling represents only the latest shake-up of global sports. , while rugby, cricket, motor sports, speed skating, athletics, and European basketball have been remade by the arrival of innovative new tournaments in the past two decades. Grigorishin himself has proposed building on the ISL to create a new “professional Olympics,” held four times a year, limited to the most popular disciplines—track and field, swimming, marathon, open-water swimming, BMX, beach volleyball, and possibly gymnastics—starting as soon as 2021 in Naples, Italy.

At the heart of it, the anger directed at the IOC derives from its dual position as sole governing body for most of the 33 sports included in the GamesÌęand sole revenue provider. That twin ability to bar athletes and strangle funding has, critics say, allowed the Olympic establishment to build an unchallengeable monopoly.

In her judgment, Judge Corley said this view was borne out by the evidence. The ISL’s debut season this year, which climaxes with a two-day final on December 20 and 21 in Las Vegas, has begun to revolutionize competitive swimming. Centered on four-way matches between swim teams from eight cities—four from the U.S. and four from Europe—the event has drawn thousands of spectators around the world and millions of television viewers.

But the court heard how, in 2018, when the ISL was trying to host a trial event to introduce swimmers, coaches, and spectators to its new format, it was repeatedly blocked by FINA, which threatened to ban from the Olympics any swimmers who took part.

In a letter sent on June 5, 2018, to all 209 FINA member federations, FINA chief executive Cornel Marculescu, a former Romanian water-polo player who is now 78, warned against taking part in the “so-called international competition ‘International Swimming League,’ which FINA does not recognise.” Marculescu added thatÌęthe federations were obliged to support all of FINA’s decisionsÌęand to request permission to take part in any tournament not sanctioned by FINA. The implied threat, the court heard, was that any national swimming body that defied FINA by participating in the ISL would be violating the terms of itsÌęFINA membership, thereby excluding itselfÌęfrom sending swimmers to the Olympics.

As part of the evidence cited by Corley, the court was shown an email sent on June 4, 2018, by USA Swimming CEO Mike Unger to his counterparts in Britain and Australia, in which Unger wrote that he was “very interested” in letting American swimmers participate in the ISL, but “there is one catch (and it’s a major one right now). FINA is apparently not happy with ISL and is intent on derailing the ISL efforts.”

Unger added that if any swimming federation defied FINA, “FINA can issue penalties against the national federation and its athletes, including suspensions.” In a later email to U.S. Aquatic Sports Inc., Unger wrote: “This is serious, not just for swimmers and not just for USA Swimming” but for all American aquatic sports. “This is not a situation to take lightly. The potential ramifications are severe.”

Soon afterward, USA Swimming told Grigorishin it would not be allowing swimmers to compete in the ISL. Faced with hosting a swimming competition with no swimmers, the ISL eventually cancelled its trial event. The first season of the league only went ahead this October after the ISL and Shields, Andrew, and HosszĂș launched their legal action in December 2018, prompting FINA to capitulate and withdraw its threat of sanctions in January.

The post Swimming’s Governing Body Is in Hot Water appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Part One

On November 21, 2018, Dependra Pathak, director general of police in the Andamans and Nicobars, an archipelago of paradise islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, issued a press release headed “Death of US National.” Pathak, a short, mustached man with the paunch of 28 years’ service in the Indian police, wrote that his office in the island capital of Port Blair had received an e-mail two days earlier from the U.S. consulate in Chennai, 850 miles away on the mainland. The consulate, Pathak said, had been contacted by an American woman, the mother of “one Mr. John Allen Chau 
 about her son’s visit to North Sentinel Island and attack by the tribesmen.” Upon receiving the e-mail, “a missing report was immediately registered” and a “detailed enquiry was initiated.” Within hours, Pathak’s detectives reported back that Chau “allegedly got killed at North Sentinel Island during his misplaced adventure in the highly restricted area while trying to interact with the uncontacted people who have a history of vigorous rejection towards outsiders.”

What Pathak did not say, because Port Blair’s small press corps already knew, was that, aside from Chau, almost no outsider had ever set foot on North Sentinel. That in itself did not make the island unusual. The Andamans and Nicobars are a lost world, 836 islands of mangroves, rainforests, and crescent-moon beaches stretching for 480 miles where the Bay of Bengal meets the Andaman Sea in the warm waters between India, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. Only 31 islands are inhabited. Living alongside Indian settlers are six protected indigenous tribes that for thousands of years have existed apart from the rest of humanity, spearing fish and turtles and shooting wild pigs with bows and arrows. This includes the people of North Sentinel, whose reputation for killing anyone who lands on their tiny island ensures that they are the world’s most isolated people.

Almost nothing is known about the Sentinelese. From their appearance, they are African. The theory is that, like three other black tribes on the Andamans, they are descended from people who migrated from the Cradle of Humankind in Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Some of them settled on a mountain range that once connected to Myanmar. Around 10,000 B.C., when the ice caps melted and the sea rose, those mountains became islands, sealing the tribes off from the world. For anthropologists, the existence of black hunter-gatherers in Asia is a wonder. For the religious, it’s a miracle: Adam and Eve, living as God created them.

Pathak wrote that he had directed the coast guard to fly over North Sentinel and a second group of officers to sail past in a patrol boat. Neither saw any sign of Chau. The evidence of the American’s death came from statements by five fishermen who first reported him missing. The men said that they had dropped him off close to shore on November 16. Returning a day later, they saw “a dead person being buried at the shore which from the silhouette of the body, clothing and circumstances appeared to be the body of John Allen Chau.” Pathak had arrested all five fishermen, plus two more men from Port Blair, all of whom, he wrote, helped Chau travel to North Sentinel despite knowing “fully well about the illegality of the action and the hostile attitude of the Sentinelese tribesmen to the outsiders.” In their defense, the fishermen stated that “the deceased … without any pressure or undue influence from any corner, had volunteered to visit North Sentinel Island for preaching Christianity to the aboriginal tribe.”

Pathak headlined his release URGENT. Still, he was probably surprised by its impact. Within a day, journalists around the world were mesmerizing the public with the story of how a 26-year-old American missionary had been killed by a Stone Age tribe on a remote island. Thousands of commentators weighed in, with a near unanimous verdict. The idea that people still lived seminaked in the forest, sustained by what they could hunt with bows and spears, was enchanting. The idea that missionaries were still venturing into the jungle to convert them was outrageous and probably racist. Stephen Corry, director of the indigenous-advocacy group Survival International, that whole populations of remote people “are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like the flu and measles to which they have no resistance.” Chau might have infected them even in death. No wonder the Sentinelese, Corry said, had “shown again and again that they want to be left alone.”

In a stream of tweets, takes, and TV segments over the months that followed, Chau was characterized at best as a dumbass backpacker and at worst as a Christian supremacist indifferent to genocide. His ignoring the tribe’s wish to be left alone and the risks he posed to them were attributed to imperialist arrogance. His attempt to “save” the Sentinelese was ascribed to delusion and brainwashing. In a on his Instagram page, his family expressed forgiveness for his killers, saying that Chau “had nothing but love for the Sentinelese,” while in the family’s only other public comment, his father, Patrick, seemed to support comparisons between his son and suicidal jihadis, that “extreme Christianity” led his son to his “not unexpected end.” Twitter reckoned that Chau deserved to die. Others found humor in his demise. Four thousand Google reviewers wrote about North Sentinel, praising the island’s beauty but questioning the cuisine (“my right leg was … still a bit raw”) and service (“we kept being interrupted by arrows”). In late December, comedian Frankie Boyle wrapped up his prime-time show on the BBC with a imagining a Sentinelese warrior splitting Chau’s penis in half, speculating that his rib cage was now being used as “a monkey’s xylophone,” and suggesting that John Allen Chau would achieve immortality as “the patron saint of daft cunts.”

Lost in this festival of scorn was much sense of the young man who journeyed to the edge of the world only to die there. Who was John Chau? What was he looking for? What did he find?

Journal entry

November 14, 2018

Port Blair

I’ve been in a safehouse in Port Blair since returning from Hut Bay, Little Andaman, for the past 11 days! I hadn’t seen any full sunlight till today and my nice tan I had acquired started to fade, as well as my thickly callused feet. The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine. I met last night with the fishermen who are all believers and who agreed to drop me off. The meeting went well—I trust them. The drop-zone was pointed out on the map as being a cove on the SW of the island and I depart in three or so hours. The plan is to link up with the crew and depart tonight, arriving at the shore around 0400. From there we make progressive contact with fish as gifts over the next few days, then send me off. Depending on the darkness, I might land briefly and bury and cache a pelican case for later. We might even send the kayak laden with gifts towards shore.

Soli Deo Gloria!

John Chau was the son of an unlikely couple, Patrick Chau and Lynda Adams-Chau. Patrick is a Chinese American success story. Born in Guangzhou in 1952, he had been training to be an artist when, in 1968, amid the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he was forced onto a communal farm and made to work ten hours a day, seven days a week, for six years. In 1974, Patrick’s father secured his son’s passage to Hong Kong. Two years later, Patrick emigrated to the United States, working odd jobs in Los Angeles and learning English from the radio before being accepted to study chemistry at the University of Southern California.

In 1983, Patrick won an Army scholarship to attend medical school at Oral Roberts University, an evangelical college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Patrick applied himself to his new religion as assiduously as his studies, reading the Bible, learning how to construct religious arguments, and declaring himself a Christian. Though never quite comfortable with ORU’s evangelism, he found that at its medical school “no one cared about your religion as long as you do your work.” In Tulsa he met Lynda Adams, an ORU professor who taught social work, at a Christmas party. The couple married in 1985, and Lynda gave birth to Brian in 1986. Patrick graduated from med school at 35 in 1988. Marilyn was born in early 1989 around the time that the family moved to Alabama for Patrick to begin his psychiatric residency. In 1991, Patrick deployed to the Gulf War as an army reservist. Soon after he returned, Lynda gave birth to John.

While Lynda was devout, Patrick’s faith had more practical foundations. He retained an attachment to Confucianism, but Christianity had given him an education, a profession, and a family, and he was happy for it to guide his wife and children. When Patrick opened a psychiatry practice in Vancouver, Washington, Lynda became an organizer for the Christian fellowship Chi Alpha at Washington State University’s local campus, and their three children attended a private school, Vancouver Christian. Patrick saw no conflict between faith and science, and he enjoyed debating religious doctrine the same as he would a medical text. Brian and Marilyn inherited their father’s pragmatic conformism and, in near identical careers, studied premed at ORU, then medicine at Loma Linda University, a school founded by Seventh-day Adventists in Southern California. They both became disability specialists focusing on veterans.

John took after his father’s more wistful side. Patrick still painted, filling the family home with idyllic landscapes: a single cabin in the mountains with smoke pluming from its chimney, or a lone figure in a canoe paddling through the wilderness. Years later, John wrote about a of a three-masted ship on a stormy sea that his father completed the year he was born. “When I was a kid, I used to gaze constantly at this,” he said. “After reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the first thing I did was to put my hand on the painting to see if I could enter into the world of Narnia. … I think this painting helped spark adventure in my young soul.”

On weekends, Patrick and Lynda took their children camping and hiking in the hills and woods around Vancouver. In a memorial essay that he distributed to friends after John’s death, Patrick said that when his son was younger, he was obsessed with BB-gun war games, forming his own team when he entered high school. But as John grew older, he was increasingly drawn to the sense of the divine that he felt when surrounded by untrammeled wilderness. “Why do I hike?” he years later. “To see but a brief glimpse of the Glory of the Creator.”

Patrick remembers John first mentioning living on a desert island at the age of ten. It was 2002, John had read Robinson Crusoe, and the family was on vacation in Hawaii when John announced that one day he wanted to live in a place exactly like that, swinging through the trees, jumping into the water, and spearing jellyfish. Patrick had laughed. But the notion of island life stuck with John, and over the years Patrick watched his son refine and reinforce his ambition.

In 2008, as a junior in high school, John traveled to Mexico on a school mission to help build an orphanage. He enjoyed meeting new people, and the experience made him wonder what the ultimate version of such a trip might be. On his return to Vancouver, John began a search for the most remote tribes on earth, which soon turned up a string of islands in the Indian Ocean. John read how for thousands of years, the tribes on the Andamans and Nicobars had cut themselves off from the world. As far back as the second century A.D., the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy wrote about “an island of Cannibals” in the archipelago. In the 13th century, “no better than wild beasts 
 heads like dogs and teeth and eyes likewise 
 a most cruel generation [who] eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race.”

After establishing a settlement on the Andamans in the mid-19th century, the British identified five separate “Negrito” tribes and, on the more southern Nicobars, two “Mongoloid” groups from Asia. Inevitably, the colonialists devastated the tribes’ numbers along with their solitude. By the 1930s, one Andamanese tribe, the Jangil, was extinct. Three others—the Great Andamanese, the Onge, and the Jarawa—had suffered a population collapse from several thousand to a few hundred. The only people to survive untouched were the hundred or so souls thought to be living on North Sentinel, the name that Britain gave the small square island, just five miles long and four miles across, that marked the northern sea approach to its new administrative capital, Port Blair. That a people had managed to live alone in the wilderness for so long was a marvel to John. Patrick described how when John “finally found the last frontier of unexplored land and people untouched by Christianity, he was excited, as if the place and the people were specifically left for him.”

Journal entry

November 15, 2018

North Sentinel

Rendezvoused successfully last night with the friends. Currently on the boat, waiting to make contact. Left around 2000 and arrived around 2230 but as we went north along the eastern shore, we saw boat lights in the distance and turned around, headed south and evaded them. All along the way, our boat was highlighted by bioluminescent plankton—and as fish jumped nearby, we could see them like darting mermaids shimmering along. The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the coastguard and navy patrols. At 0430, we entered the cove on the western shore and as the sun began to light the east, me and two of the guys jumped in the shallows and brought my two pelicans and kayak onto the northern point of the cove. The dead coral is sharp and I already got a slight scratch on my right leg. Now we see a Sentinel islander house and are waiting for them to come out. We also saw three large fires on the eastern shore last night.

Soli Deo Gloria

Seventeen years ago, I also went looking for the tribes of the Andamans. Like John, I’d been a backpacker in my twenties. In my thirties, I became a foreign correspondent as a way to stay on the road and get paid for it. In 2002, I moved to India and met an anthropologist who told me an astonishing story about a group of Neolithic tribes still living on remote Indian Ocean islands. Meeting them became my obsession.

As John had, I hoarded information about the Andamans. Like him, I was less interested in the science or history of indigenous peoples than in the adventure they promised. For several years, I made repeated furtive attempts to reach them. I was questioned by officials in Port Blair, had a shoving match with a policeman who was following me, and was eventually asked to leave the islands. I gave up only after I moved to Africa in 2006.

One reason, I think, that Patrick and a handful of John’s friends spoke with me in the months after his death, breaking a silence they imposed in the face of the coverage he received, was that I had my own experience with the islands. I recognized the giddiness in John’s journal, the way the islands seemed to offer something big and difficult and dangerous and extraordinary.

Where John and I differed was that while I had been a reporter pursuing a story, John wanted to be the story. By his late teens, he had progressed far beyond Robinson Crusoe. He devoured books on iconic missionaries like David Livingstone in Africa. Jim Elliot, speared to death at age 28, along with four other Americans, by the Huaorani people in Ecuador in 1956, was a particular role model. The missionary was raised within walking distance of the Chau family home, just across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. As John grew up, the legend of the local hero killed by savages swelled. Elliot’s story was told in several books, a documentary in 2002, and a movie in 2005.

There were parallels, too, between the Huaorani and the Sentinelese. Both tribes had almost no contact with the outside world. Both seemed to have ambiguous attitudes toward outsiders. Before killing Elliot and his friends, the Huaorani exchanged gifts with them, and one tribesman even took a ride in their plane. The Sentinelese reputation for aggression was reinforced in 1981 when dozens of armed warriors tried to surround a beached freighter that had run aground, forcing the crew to radio for an airlift. (Metal salvaged from the ship is thought to be the source of the iron tips on the Sentinelese’s arrows and spears.) In 2004, a lone bowman tried to shoot down a coast guard helicopter, and two years later the Sentinelese killed a pair of Indian crab fishermen who drifted ashore. But John also knew that since 1967, Indian anthropologists had been enjoying brief, nonviolent excursions, pulling up close in boats and dropping coconuts in the surf. The Sentinelese would approach unarmed, scoop up the coconuts, and even briefly board the boats.

Despite these encouraging signs, there was no doubt that an expedition to North Sentinel could be fatal. There was no question, either, that this was what made the idea so heroic. The power of Elliot’s legacy stemmed largely from his murder. A passage from his journal in 1949 is taken by many missionaries as proof that Elliot knew the risks and went anyway, regarding self-­sacrifice as virtuous and even logical. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose,” he .

John found such sentiments inspiring. To Patrick, they were alarming. One day in 2009, when Patrick overheard his 17-year-old son telling friends that reaching North Sentinel was his calling and his mission, Patrick’s heart sank. He knew that his son’s calling was based on fantasy.

Journal entry

November 15, 2018

North Sentinel Island, Southwest Cove

Around 0830, I tried initiating contact. I went back to the cached kayak and built it up, then round to the boat and got two large fish—one barracuda and one half GT/tuna. I put them on the kayak and began waving to the house we had seen. As I was about 400 yds out, I heard women looing and chattering. Then I spotted two dugout canoes with outriggers. I rowed past one, then saw movement on shore. Two armed Sentinelese came rushing out yelling at me—they had two arrows each, unstrung, until they got closer. I hollered “My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you. Here is some fish!”

I regret I began to panic slightly as I saw them string arrows in their bows. I picked up the GT/tuna and threw it toward them. They kept coming. I slid the barracuda off. It started to sink but my thoughts were directed toward the fact I was almost in arrow range. I backpaddled. When they got the fish, I turned and paddled like I never have in my life, back to the boat.Ìę

I felt some fear but mostly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away. I can now say I’ve been nearly shot by the Sentinelese and I’ve walked and cached gear on their island. Now I’m resting in the boat and will try again later, leaving gifts on shore and in rocks. Lord protect me and guide me.

As John entered his twenties, Patrick had reasons to hope that his son would change course before it was too late. John followed the family example by heading to ORU to study health and physical education, and he hinted to his parents that he was considering a career in medicine.

But John’s preoccupation was hiking, climbing, fishing, and kayaking. In Tulsa he would escape whenever he could, fishing on his lunch break and on weekends bouldering, trekking, and paddling around the Ozarks. Some trips took him farther afield. In 2012, John had traveled to Cape Town as part of an ORU mission trip, and in 2013 he returned for three months. After graduating in 2014, John traveled to Kurdistan with More than a Game, a Christian soccer charity, then headed back to Cape Town for a third stint there. By the summer of 2015, John seemed to have decided to live as much of his life outdoors as possible. He qualified as a wilderness medic. He led trekking expeditions around Mount Adams in Washington. For three years, beginning in 2016, he worked for six months as a park guide in Northern California, basing himself at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, where he lived in a one-room cabin owned by the National Park Service.

More and more, John was choosing to experience the outdoors alone. He backpacked solo around South Africa and India. Back in the U.S., he made treks around Whiskeytown and along California’s Lost Coast, spending days by himself. At times, John complained of loneliness. “One thing I learned for certain: man was not made to be alone,” he after an 11-day hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2014. But his compulsion for the wilderness often found him heading out unaccompanied. He started a blog called That Solitary Path. He filled his Instagram feed with pictures of empty tracks heading into the hills, tiny tents in vast landscapes, and one-man campsites high up in the snow, his hiking gear artfully arranged in the foreground.

To his few hundred followers, John’s life appeared to be that of a bold outdoorsman. He called himself an explorer, and his posts depicted an existence almost continuously on the road, chasing down a new peak or trekking route or ice-cold swimming hole in a hidden mountain ravine. He liked to pose for selfies as if roaring and tell stories of close escapes, such as making it off the Cascades as a wildfire closed in and recovering from a rattlesnake bite. His descriptions of his ethnicity—he wrote “part Irish, part native American (Choctaw), part African, and part Chinese and southeast Asian” in his journal—suggested he was experimenting with a more complex and worldly identity. On Instagram, he presented himself as the consummate trail bro. He was almost always “super stoked” by the prospect of a “super rad” hike with a fellow “wildman” or “legends.” “Dang,” his followers would comment. “Legit, bro.”

Only rarely did the mask slip. “Ah man, don’t envy it,” he to one admirer. “It’s hard, and the pics only show the good parts.” In truth, John was censoring more than his moods. In his first posts, he quoted psalms and missionaries. But after his first trip to the Andamans in 2015, he cut back on references to his beliefs, mostly confining himself to the cryptic Latin hashtag #SoliDeoGloria, “Glory to God alone.” On the Andamans, his posts of beaches and scuba dives suggested that his trip was just one more adventure. In Chennai, en route to his first stay on the islands, he met Elkanah Jebasingh, 25, a machine-learning specialist for Amazon’s Alexa program. The pair would connect whenever John passed through, a total of four times by October 2018. John appeared “quite open,” Elkanah recalls. “He showed his face to people.” After John’s death, when Elkanah read about his friend’s true reason for being on the islands, he was stunned. All that John had told him was that he had friends in the Andamans. “He never told me anything about his mission.”

John’s reticence reflected a conscious hardening of his faith. From his late teens, Patrick wrote, his son countenanced no “questioning or criticizing” of “this adventure of evangelism.” Patrick felt “excluded from any input.” In his journal, John asked God to “please continue to keep all of us involved hidden from the physical and spiritual forces who desire to keep the people here in darkness.” John’s rad life wasn’t exactly a front, but it hid his clandestine objective. Patrick concluded that John’s prior exploits were all in preparation for Sentinel Island.

By late 2016, Patrick felt that time was running out to try and stop his son. John had made a second trip to the Andamans and seemed more determined than ever. Brian, who found his brother’s single-mindedness just as disturbing, told his father that there was “no way to change his stubborn mind.” Patrick decided that he had to try. He confronted his son, telling him that what to him might seem like righteous commitment was evidence to anyone else of a trapped and blinkered mind. “In my observation, he was selectively collecting whatever preacher’s doctrines were in favour of his self-directed, self-governed, self-appointed plan,” he wrote.

John stuck to his belief that it was his duty to go to North Sentinel. The islanders were damned to “eternal fire” if they never heard the Gospel, and as an outdoorsman with a knack for making friends in new places, John was one of the few souls in Christendom who could save them. It felt ordained, John said, like God was calling him. Patrick believed his son was deceiving himself. This wasn’t just about helping the Sentinelese or obeying God. This was about John’s Messiah complex. He described his son as a victim of fantasies, fanatacism, and extremism.

The argument ended without resolution, and Patrick never raised the matter again. But for the next two years he was haunted by their quarrel—and by John’s certainty. He was never able to shake the feeling that he was watching his son walk calmly and confidently toward his own death.

Part Two

To reach the Andamans, you fly to India’s east coast, then continue toward the horizon. The islands appear out of the ocean after two hours over open water—first one, then five, then dozens of dots of dark jungle ringed by bright halos of shallows. Only when the plane banks does a small settlement of rusted roofs and dusty roads appear at the end of a forested headland, the one sign of human habitation where otherwise there is only water, mudflats, beaches, and trees.

On the ground, Port Blair initially resembles any provincial Indian town. The slums are squeezed onto its highest, most distant hills. From there, tight alleys tumble down past orphanages and temples, past the A1 Chicken and Mutton Centre, past gold traders and haberdashers, before emerging at the wharves and open sewers of Junglee Ghat, where the last of the Great Andamanese warriors, defeated and ruined by ­disease, lived out their days. A closer look reveals a town struggling to impose itself. The roads are buckled. The walls are cracked and crumbling under black mold. The jetties have splintered under the assault of the dozens of cyclones and storms that roll in off the Bay of Bengal every year. The sense is of a place that could disappear at any moment.

Anyone researching the islands soon comes across the Hindi term kala pani, which translates as “black waters” and originates in a Hindu taboo on ocean voyages. The injunction contends that long-distance travel does not broaden the mind, as commonly supposed, but putrefies the character by exposing it to impurity. This view of exploration as corruption—either because what the traveler finds infects them, or perhaps because finding themselves so far from home, they hang up their moral compass—finds support in the long history of foreigners showing up on the islands and behaving abominably. Anthropologists speculate that the ancient hostility recorded by Ptolemy and Marco Polo was a reaction to slave raiders. That reasoned xenophobia was reinforced by British colonialists, who turned their muskets and cannons on the islanders, stole their land, then stood back as pestilence carried off most of the population.

A particularly grim example was Port Blair’s Cellular Jail, opened in 1906 to house Indian freedom fighters shipped off to rot. Built on a spur above town, the prison’s design was based on a panopticon, allowing wardens and doctors to see into every cell—the better to monitor medical experiments they conducted on inmates, such as measuring the efficacy of different malaria medicines. Among Indians, kala pani came to refer to the jail itself.

Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness” (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,” Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was not a success. … We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”

The end of colonialism was accompanied by evolving ideas about indigenous peoples. Among the theories gaining currency were those of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a British researcher who visited the Andamans from 1906 to 1908, whose study of the tribes was foundational to the new discipline of social anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown rejected the notion that all societies followed the same path to progress and that the tribes were less advanced and thus inferior to Europeans. He proposed that the tribes’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle was best explained not by backwardness but by superior adaptation to their environment. Such ideas spelled the end of a consensus that racism had scientific justification, and the emergence of the notion that all human beings are of equal worth.