After conquering Everest at 80, Yuichiro Miura eyes next challenge
Japanese adventurer reached world's highest point for third time in a decade despite suffering heart failure. Now he's aiming to ski down sixth-highest peak, Cho Oyu, when he's 85 and scale Everest again when he's 90, writes Barney Henderson
"As I went down, I felt the probability I would die was 100 per cent - 120 per cent, even." Yuichiro Miura, exhausted, struggling to breathe, and with his heart fading, thought he had taken his final steps as he descended from the summit of Everest. He perhaps had no right to be there at all. At 80 years old, the Japanese adventurer had endured three recent heart operations and extensive surgery to repair a shattered pelvis, and he had battled diabetes. He had reached the summit of the world's highest mountain twice before, aged 70 and 75. But, like George Mallory 90 years earlier, he was called back to Everest for a third time; and in May 2013 he became the oldest person ever to have reached the summit.
"I had a dream to climb Everest at this age," he says. "If you have a dream, never give up. Dreams come true."
Mallory famously answered the question of why he kept returning to Everest when it had claimed the lives of so many members of his past expeditions (and later, of course, he would meet his death there, too) with the words, "Because it's there." Miura is also unable to explain how the mountain drives men and women to such obsession.
"All the time, I think of Everest. I can't stop," he says. "It's the mountain I love the most, the mountain I pay the most respect to."
When I reached the summit it all sank in. I could not believe it - I was standing there for about an hour.
