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Messner has been called tactless and egocentric by his critics. After his solo ascent of Everest, for example, he told admiring fellow South Tyroleans, "I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland, and my handkerchief is my flag." On talk-show stints, he tends to shout down other guests. Indeed, a mountaineer who has known him for years thinks fame has been hard on a man who finds peace in solitude: "Everyone wants to get in touch with him. Everybody wants to shake his hand." He is divorced from West German Journalist Uschi Demeter, and lately, says one Messner watcher, "it seems there is a different woman in every base camp."
One secret of his mountaineering successes is that he travels light, as he might to climb an Alpine peak. The legendary pinnacles are, to him, small ascents stacked one on top of another. He scales the earth's greatest heights by what he calls "fair means," avoiding the rope networks, high-mountain camps and bottled air that were part of the historic eight-thousander sieges, which frequently involved ten or more climbers supported by dozens of Sherpas. The minimalist technique has attracted thousands of imitators. Says Swiss Mountain Guide Erhard Loretan, 27, who, with his countryman Jean Troillet, 38, raced to the top of Everest last August and back down again to base camp in an astonishing 43 hours: "The reason we can now climb so quickly and easily is that Messner served as an example for us."
Indeed, his breakthroughs have led many to believe he has a mysterious physical edge over other mountaineers. Not so, says Oswald Oelz, a Swiss physician and one of Messner's former climbing partners, who conducted a series of tests on high-altitude climbers in a hypobaric chamber. Messner emerged with results similar to those of an above-average marathon runner. He and other mountaineers who had successfully penetrated the 8,000-m barrier proved to have what Oelz calls a "rather active respiratory center," meaning that as the air gets thinner, their rate of breathing involuntarily increases. "He's obviously got a superb high-altitude physique," says Chris Bonington, who in 1975 led a successful British expedition to Mount Everest, "but what has given him the edge over everyone is creative innovation. There is a wall called 'impossible' that the great mass of people in any field face. Then one person who's got a kind of extra imaginative drive jumps that wall. That's Reinhold Messner."