But what struck me was the side story about another sailor Donald Crowhurst who joined the round the world race only to realise he was not going to make it. He had neither the skill nor the appetite for the treacherous journey. Prior to the race he had gone very public about his intentions and bet all his investments on the race so instead of accepting defeat and giving up, he spent months faking his reports and pretending to be sailing around the world whilst bobbing around in one spot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In the end according to the diaries he left, the pressure of the dishonesty and of being revealed as a fraud led him to jump off the boat in mid ocean never to be seen again.

A similar story in the recent Netflix documentary Race to the Summit, about two radical alpine climbers who challenged each other to be the fastest to reach the highest peaks in the Alps. As the story unfolds it becomes evident that one of the climbers Ueli Steck has started to fake his results, claiming to have lost his camera, dropped his camera, forgotten to switch on the GPS on his watch and a range of excuses why he was unable to prove that he had in fact summitted the mountains as claimed.