80-year-old becomes oldest man to climb Mount Everest

An 80-year-old Japanese mountaineer, Yuichiro Miura, who climbed Mount Everest five years ago, but just missed becoming the oldest man to reach the summit, has finally claimed the title.

Miura reached the summit days before his rival, 81-year-old Nepalese man Min Bahadur Sherchan, is due to set off on the same climb.

Public broadcaster NHK showed footage of Miura’s daughter Emili talking with them via speaker phone in Tokyo, clapping when her brother told her they had reached the top.

“I made it!” he said over the phone. “I never imagined I could make it to the top of Mt. Everest at age 80. This is the world’s best feeling, although I’m totally exhausted. Even at 80, I can still do quite well.”

The climbers planned to stick around the summit for about half an hour, take photos and then start to descend, Miura’s Tokyo office said.

Nepalese mountaineering official Gyanendra Shrestha, at Everest base camp, confirmed that Miura had reached the summit, making him the oldest person to do so.

On his expedition’s website, Miura explained his attempt to scale Everest at such an advanced age: “It is to challenge (my) own ultimate limit. It is to honour the great Mother Nature.”

He said a successful climb would raise the bar for what is possible.

“And if the limit of age 80 is at the summit of Mt. Everest, the highest place on earth, one can never be happier,” he said.

However, if Sherchan is able to follow him, it is possible that he will only hold the coveted title for a few days. Miura’s daughter, Emili, said he “doesn’t really care” about the rivalry. “He’s doing it for his own challenge.”

The situation was not too different five years ago, when, at the age of 75, Miura sought to recapture the title of oldest man to summit the mountain. He had set the record in 2003 at age 70, but it was later broken twice by slightly older Japanese climbers.

He reached the summit on May 26, 2008, at the age of 75 years and 227 days, according to Guinness World Records. But the record eluded him because Sherchan scaled the summit the day before, at the age of 76 years and 340 days.

Sherchan, a former Gurkha soldier in the British army, first began mountaineering in 1960 when he climbed Mount Dhaulagiri, the 26,790-foot high peak in Nepal, according to his grandson, Manoj Guachan. Always an adventurer, and unbowed by age, he walked the length of Nepal in 2003.