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Today marks the 105th anniversary of the first expedition to the south pole by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Famously, the second place finishers, a British team lead by Robert Falcon Scott, showed up at the pole a mere 34 days later — and perished on the return journey.

Historical firsts aren’t usually quite this cinematic. Imagine if Apollo 11 had been racing a Russian capsule to the moon in 1969, or Charles Lindbergh had been neck-and-neck with a foreign rival on his solo flight over the Atlantic?

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The contrasting results of the two expeditions has inevitably obsessed armchair explorers (and real explorers) ever since: Why did one end in triumph and the other in tragedy? The National Post provides the best arguments below.

Amundsen was coached by the Inuit

Amundsen was fresh off his three-year odyssey of becoming the first explorer to successfully cross the Northwest Passage. With much of that voyage being spent stuck in ice, Amundsen had a lot of downtime to hang out with the Inuit and learn how they kept alive in extreme conditions. Thus, the Norwegian came to the Southern hemisphere with what was then the cutting-edge in polar technology: Dog sleds, igloo-building techniques and loose-fitting fur parkas. This is still a point of pride among Inuit. Amundsen was “their guy.”