December 14

Roald Amundsen[i] and his team won the race to the South Pole when the expedition arrived there on the 14th in 1911. The team consisted of Olav Bjaaland[ii], Helmer Hanssen[iii], Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting[iv]. Wisting had been part of Amundsen’s team that went to the North Pole. Amundsen and Wisting were the first people to reach both the North and South Poles.
[i] On the 18th of June, in 1928 while on a mission to rescue aviator Umberto Nobile and his team whose airplane had crashed near the North Pole. Amundsen disappeared when the airplane he was in together with Leif Dietrichson, Rene Guilbaud, and three others , while searching for Nobile's crew, whose semi-rigid airship, the Italia, had crashed near the North Pole.
[ii] Bjaaland would light the torch for the 1952 Winter Olympics.
[iii] Hanssen’s autobiography, which was published in London in 1936 was entitled The Voyages of a Modern Viking.
[iv] Wisting had also been with Amundsen onboard the vessel Fram, which was used in their hunt for the elusive Northwest Passage. On the 5th of December in1936, shortly before the 25th anniversary of the South Pole expedition, Wisting was discovered, dead from a heart attack, in his bunk on the Fram, which was had been converted into a museum.