Yuichiro miura biography of barack

• Yuichiro Miura reached the summit of Mount Everest Thursday morning
• He became the oldest man to ever climb the mountain aged 80
• Missed out on record five years ago when Nepalese rival beat him
  
• His old foe Min Bahadur Sherchan, 81, is following close behind

By SARA MALM

Published: | Updated:

A Japanese 80-year-old has become the oldest man to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Extreme skier Yuichiro Miura conquered the 29,035ft peak at 9am local time Thursday morning, beating his 81-year-old rival, Nepalese Min Bahadur Sherchan, to the top.

Mr Miura climbed Mount Everest five years ago, but just missed out on the record when Mr Serchan, a former Gurkha, accomplished the feat aged 76.

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My last meal / Tokyo

Legendary mountain climber Yuichiro Miura, who made headlines for conquering Everest at the age of 80, talks inspiration, near-disasters and his passion for steak.

“I’ve been coming to this place for more than 10 years. Basically I love a good steak. If I come with someone else we’ll usually share a rib-eye and a good bottle of wine; I can eat nearly a kilo of steak on my own. I like eating a lot and preferably with other people. We had 16 people over for New Year at our house in Hokkaido: children, grandchildren and friends.

I’ve climbed Everest three times now. The altitude sickness at 8,000 metres is bad and I lost 10kg in the final week the last time. I was still thinking about food though. Before the final ascent, my Japanese team – including my son [former Olympic skier] Gota – ate noodles, mochi [rice cakes], canned sea urchin, salted squid and salmon. We even made temaki rolls from seaweed and rehydrated rice. When I came back to Japan the first thing I wanted to eat was sushi.

I come from Aomori but I’ve lived in Sapporo for years. The snow is great there. People call me a climber but I think of myself as a skier. Most of the time I climb mountains just so I can ski down. I’ve been skiing since I was three. It was different back then: you had to walk to the top first. You’d call it ski-mountaineering now.

When [Edmund] Hillary and Tenzing [Norgay] climbed Everest in 1953 I was at university in Hokkaido and it made a big impression on me. I later became friends with Hillary. He said skiing down Everest was crazy but that if he’d been younger he might have have done the same thing.

I did so many things when I was a young man that when I hit middle age I realised I’d lost my motivation. It was my father [legendary skier Keizo Miura] who inspired me. He skied down Mont Blanc when he was 99 and for his 100th birthday we went to Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah. On

The 80-year-old Japanese mountaineer who is the oldest person to reach the top of Mount Everest says he almost died during his descent and does not plan another climb of the world’s highest peak, though he hopes to do plenty of skiing.

Yuichiro Miura, who also conquered the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) peak when he was 70 and 75, returned to Japan on Wednesday looking triumphant but ready for a rest. He was sympathetic toward an 81-year-old Nepalese climber who on Tuesday abandoned his attempt to climb Everest, and break Miura’s record, due to worsening weather.

Bahadur Sherchan, the Nepalese mountaineer, faced difficult odds due to the brief climbing window remaining after delays in getting funding for his own ascent, Miura said.

“He is to be pitied,” said Miura, who had downplayed any talk of a rivalry.

Miura and his son Gota, who has climbed Everest twice, said things went well during the expedition because they carefully paced themselves, walking only half-days and resting in the afternoons.

But Miura said he was dangerously weak at the beginning of his May 23 descent.

Though he felt fine after he removed his oxygen mask on the summit to pose for photos, he suffered for it on the way down.

“I lost strength in my legs,” Miura said.

“I could not move at all.”

Helped down by Gota and others, Miura revived after having some food and water at the team’s 8,500-meter (27,887-foot) -high base camp.

“He just wouldn’t give up. This is the real strength of Yuichiro Miura,” said Gota of his father’s recovery and persistence in traveling another two and a half hours later in the day to reach their camp at 8,000 meters (26,247 feet).

Miura was a daredevil speed skier in his youth, and skied down Everest’s South Col in 1970, using a parachute to brake his descent. He

The government has just established a new public award named after alpinist-skier Yuichiro Miura for "adventurers who challenge themselves to the limit of human potential." Originally the recipients of the prize, whom Miura will select himself, were going to be seniors, but at its namesake's insistence all ages are now eligible. Nevertheless, the deed that inspired the honor, Miura's conquering of Mount Everest last month at the age of 80, thus making him the oldest person ever to scale the world's highest peak, has been heralded as a valuable inspiration for Japan's boomers. If Miura can reach the summit of Everest at such an advanced age and with a faulty ticker to boot (four operations for arrhythmia since 2008, not to mention a history of diabetes and hypertension), then think of what mere mortals can accomplish.

The mass media tend to ignore those aspects of a human-interest story that might detract from its positive effects. Nobody wants to be a wet blanket — except maybe the weekly magazines.

One, Bunshun, published an article in its June 13 issue that attempted to temper the excitement of Miura's accomplishment with a balanced accounting of how he went about it. The reporter mentions that no one can deny that the feat was impressive, but it's not as if any healthy 80-year-old, even one who trained as hard as Miura did, can do the same thing. You need money, and lots of it, and for all intents and purposes the Miura family, which is in the mountain-climbing business, is run like a corporation. This was the octogenarian's third successful climb of Everest, and though it was characterized as one man versus nature, it was actually a huge financial undertaking. A dozen sponsors jockeyed for the right to have their names printed on the flag that Miura waved when he reached the summit because there was a cameraman there to film it, ostensibly for record-keeping purposes but also because those sponsors ex