Nirmal Purja

Nirmal Purja grew up in a poor family in western Nepal and joined the British Army's Brigade of Gurkhas as a young man, later becoming one of the first Gurkhas selected into the UK Special Boat Service, an elite unit whose training gave him an unusual baseline of physical endurance and composure under extreme pressure before he had climbed a single major mountain.

He left the military to pursue mountaineering full time and, in 2019, announced a plan he called Project Possible: climbing all fourteen of the world's peaks over 8,000 metres, a list that includes Everest, K2 and others, within seven months. Most professional climbers considered the plan close to impossible, since the previous fastest completion of the full set had taken almost eight years, and each mountain typically requires weeks of acclimatisation and carries serious risk of avalanche, altitude sickness and sudden weather changes that can strand or kill climbers with little warning.

Purja completed all fourteen summits in six months and six days, funding much of the expedition through personal debt and last-minute sponsorship as he went, and relying heavily on Sherpa climbers and fixed-rope teams whose contribution he was unusually vocal about crediting, in contrast to a mountaineering culture that has often left Sherpa labour uncredited. During the same period he was also involved in high-altitude rescues of stranded climbers on Everest and K2, work that added real risk to an already extreme schedule.

His achievement was documented in the Netflix film 14 Peaks, and he has continued climbing and advocating for greater recognition of Nepali and Sherpa mountaineers within a sport that has often centred Western climbers' names over theirs.