Sport

Typically, when climbing records are broken, Climbing reporters like me are quick to celebrate and share the details. But this one felt different. From my view in Yosemite, where I’m based for the season, most of the climbers I know regard the ascent—and specifically the dad in the equation—with dismissal or disdain.

Soon I heard the rumors: “It’s all for publicity.” “It’s such a junk show.” “The kids were crying the whole time.” “The dad’s got this weird, conservative agenda.” Climbers accused Joe Evermore of various crimes: hiring illegal and unqualified guides, getting in the way of a search and rescue operation, dragging up children who didn’t want to be there. Over breakfast tables and birthday dinners, I watched my friends and former colleagues debate whether the seven-year-old deserved to say he’d “climbed” El Cap: After all, neither he nor his dad led or even cleaned any of the pitches. Yet while many members of the climbing community condemned the Evermores, the world of non-climbers could not stop celebrating.

To suss out some truth from these clashing versions of the story, I spoke with Joe Evermore himself, one of his hired guides (who agreed to be interviewed in exchange for anonymity), the director of the Yosemite Mountaineering School, and two Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) members who encountered the Evermores at the summit. What I found was a complicated picture of media, climbing achievement, and parenting—and a much bigger story than what’s been told.

You might not think much about wind. Storms, sure, but you may not ponder the forces behind the soft, warm breezes that bend the switchgrass or the stiff, cold northers that sting the cheeks. You haven’t studied the physics of gases that yearn for stabilization and rush from high- to low-pressure areas. You don’t analyze the various wind currents flowing in different directions at different altitudes, moving like the traffic on some Dallas interchange in the sky.

And why would you? You’re not a competitive hot-air balloonist. You’re not someone who dreams of catching and riding the waves of the great invisible, swaying in a wicker basket thousands of feet in the air with only the heat of a propane flame to aid your lift. You’re not rated on your ability to toss a ribbon-tailed beanbag out of the basket and hit a large X on the ground below, as if you were playing an airborne game of cornhole.

Few balloonists in the world can maneuver their aircraft well enough to race in the World Hot Air Balloon Championship, held every other year in wide-open skies, where there are scant power lines that might ensnare these gossamer vehicles. About one hundred balloonists qualify. Only fifty or so—the best of the best—return frequently.

But even among that exclusive class, there are no competitors quite like the Heartsills. They are the first family of balloon racing—the Mannings of a sport with a tiny fraction of football’s fandom. Joe Heartsill, the clan’s 75-year-old patriarch, is built compact and lean, like a trail runner, with powder-white hair and tanned skin that betrays the years he spent working as a realtor beneath the West Texas sun. He tends to survey a room like an eagle at its perch, masking his killer instinct with a warm smile or an encouraging nod.

A recently inducted member of the U.S. Ballooning Hall of Fame, he has won five U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championships, six Honda World Grand Prix races, and the 1995 World Hot Air Balloon Championship. His older son, Lucas, who is 48, was once named the national rookie of the year. His younger son, 41-year-old Rhett, was the 2016 world champion and is a four-time winner of the U.S. nationals.

They’re a handsome and clean-cut trio, shockingly agile, able to vault into a gondola four feet tall in the time it takes to say, “All right, let’s go.” When they’re relaxing on their ranch near San Angelo, they may act like members of any other West Texas family—watching football games, taking a dip in the stock tank, or noting the natural springs where the axis deer have gathered. They may talk about work—Joe’s real estate investments, Rhett’s oil-and-gas ventures, or Lucas’s anesthesiology duties at the nearby Shannon Medical Center.

But then, looking out onto the horizon of live oak and brush, they can’t help but notice the cottonlike cumulus or flat, gray stratus clouds suspended above them. The vaporous drift brings to mind wind. Wind prompts thoughts of the next race: the navigable currents above a European mountain range or a Midwestern cornfield.

FOR A MOMENT before The Moment — no, not that one; the other one, the one that started it all — Sophie Cunningham considers exercising restraint.

Her team is fine. The Fever are up by 17 over the Sun, and there are only 46 seconds left in this 2025 game that long ago went off the rails.

Her teammate is fine. Caitlin Clark took a finger to the eye in the third quarter, courtesy of Connecticut guard Jacy Sheldon. But Clark’s final act before calling it a night and retreating to the bench was to drain a 3-pointer, which put the game well out of reach with a few minutes left. So, advantage, Clark.

This is all fine, Cunningham thinks, as she runs the length of the court. She’s chasing after Sheldon, of all people, who has just stolen the ball for a fast break, and Cunningham tells herself she doesn’t have to foul. She can let this go, can let Sheldon go, because everything is f…

F— it.

Her sister, Lindsey, watching at home in Missouri, can hear Cunningham’s resolve snap all the way from Indianapolis. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Lindsey prays. “And … there it is.”

Throughout his time at the monastery, meditation had been the most difficult aspect for Wembanyama to embrace. It’s hard for someone 7-foot-4 to sit cross-legged at all, let alone silently for up to 90 minutes, without moving.

But he kept at it. Each night he slept in three single-size beds that had been pushed together to accommodate his frame. Each morning he rose at 4:30 to train. The monks would have him run through the forests near the monastery or along an uneven 200-meter hillside track, doing frog jumps, sprints and one-legged hops uphill and downhill to build his balance and stamina.

They taught him the Shaolin 13 Fist Form — one of the two basic forms of kung fu meant to teach efficient weight shifts, stability and striking principles.

Master Yan’an said he designed Wembanyama’s customized martial arts training to emphasize controlling his center of gravity, which would generate force from different positions and resist external forces, to mimic the double-teams and physical play he’d face from NBA opponents.

Several times a day Wembanyama meditated with 100 other monks, each session’s length determined by the length of the wick of incense that burned in the center of the room. Thirty minutes was doable. But sometimes the incense burned for 90 minutes, and it was agonizing for the then-21-year-old Wembanyama to sit that long.

“I knew he could do it,” Master Yan’an said. “Because when he trains, he always tries again and again until he is the best.”

Master Yan’an recognized then what the basketball world is recognizing now: that Victor Wembanyama has perhaps the most unprecedented set of skills and untapped potential anyone has ever seen, and that he requires a similarly unprecedented training regimen to realize it.

This is the story of how 34 generations of Shaolin warrior history trained a once-in-a-generation NBA superstar, one who looks poised to dominate for the rest of his nascent career.