> However, why when opportunity is open to all, the ethnicity of the lady who recently trekked to the South Pole has made the news remains a mystery.
You see it that opportunities are equal, and therefore that an achievement is not remarkable (well, maybe remarkable, but not newsworthy).
Whereas others see it that opportunities are not equal, or at least they haven't been, and therefore the fact that it has been achieved is newsworthy and worth celebrating, if for no other reason than it shows that things have improved and/or are still improving.
For the lady in question, she probably found it easier to raise funds for her trip than a white bloke would these days, because it's been done before by somebody like him, but not by somebody like her. To stand a better chance of raising funds, you probably have to be doing something new or different.
Going back maybe thirty years, it probably would have been easier back then for the white bloke to raise funds than a lady like this, even though it wouldn't have been particularly new or different for him even back then.
So something has changed over those 30 years, and this achievement is a sign that it's changed. And that's what's being celebrated.