I missed the NPR thing, but the hype does get on my nerves. I was just thinking of the schlockumentary thing that had a segment on Tori Allen ("Superhuman Freaks" or something like that.) Most of it was OK, but they tried so hard to hype Tori - there were claims that she was the top US climber in bouldering, speed and difficulty. While I think she's won speed comps and maybe a year of PCA, she doesn't compete on the World Cup difficulty circuit, (and there's no real US difficulty championships) so they can't make that claim. I'm bringing that up because I wouldn't be suprised that someone is claiming that he was "the youngest person to climb 5.13". On his site they make the more reasonable claim, "Youngest American Climber to on-sight 13a (10 years old)". That's insanely impressive, but there are some super strong kids in europe who are doing slightly more mind boggling things.
The thing with the Nose and Halfdome in a day seems potentially lame and over hyped. On the other hand, the way that Hans has been setting record times has been by doing insane amounts of simul-climbing - so to do both in a day, I'll bet that this kid will be following Hans through multi-hundred foot chunks of 5.10+ simul-climbing - which may be crazy, but isn't terribly lame.
Who's Scott Cory????
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