A CHALLENGE TOO FAR?

Ben Fogle and Victoria Pendleton are known for their endurance – but would that be enough to climb Everest? A new documentary sees them attempt it...

Victoria Pendleton and Ben Fogle have been super-successful superhumans for most of their adult lives. From the Olympic velodrome to the South Pole, they’ve pushed themselves to the most gruelling feats of endurance – but can they rise to the ultimate challenge? Can they triumph where so many have failed, and climb all 29,029 feet of Mount Everest?

ITV documentary Our Everest Challenge: With Ben Fogle And Victoria Pendleton charts their attempt, and it’s a spellbinding mixture of sacrifice and success. To begin with all seems well. Ben, who’s built a TV career on adventuring, is confident of fulfilling his dream of scaling the world’s tallest mountain. Like Victoria, he’s been climbing peaks in the Andes and the Alps for the past two years in readiness for the task. ‘This is the biggest thing ever in my life and I’m determined to succeed,’ says Ben, 44, when he gazes up at the mountain from base camp.

Olympic cycling heroine Victoria, 37, who’s now a qualified jockey too, seems quietly confident of joining him at the peak, and why shouldn’t she be? Not only are the pair fit, they also have British mountaineer and Everest veteran Kenton Cool there to guide them. And in the UK, Dr Sundeep Dhillon, an altitude expert and mountaineer, is on the other end of a phone in case they have any questions.

Before a six-day, uphill hike to base camp, Ben and Victoria attend a ceremony in Nepal where they call on the mountain gods to grant them safe passage. Then the real work begins – and problems start to emerge. By the time Victoria has scaled the vast Khumbu Icefall – a frozen waterfall that’s half a mile wide – she’s shaking uncontroll- ably with the cold and can’t even take off her boots at night. More worryingly, her oxygen levels have dipped and urgently need topping up.

As Ben and Victoria climb higher on day two, her oxygen levels plunge so low she is at risk of hypoxia, a critical deficiency of oxygen to the brain. ‘The condition causes the brain to swell and it starts to squeeze out of the skull,’ says Sundeep Dhillon. Kenton Cool suggests another ‘rotation’, where mountaineers move backwards and forwards between camps on the lower reaches of Everest to acclimatise to the altitude. But he soon realises this is only delaying the inevitable. ‘I don’t want to give up but I’m going to have to,’ says Victoria, fighting back tears. ‘I feel, for the first time in my life, that my body is failing me. I’ve always felt so capable.’

Ben carries on, but later starts to falter and becomes almost delirious at the pros-

pect of dying and never seeing his children Ludo, eight, and Iona, seven, again. Such an outcome seems possible when his oxygen regulator explodes. Then his cameraman Mark Fisher suffers the same setback. Luckily for them, help is at hand.

As viewers will see, Ben reaches the summit and breaks down in tears. He later says he hopes his experience will inspire others. ‘This documentary is for all the people who’ve been told they couldn’t and shouldn’t do something, to give them the confidence to fulfil their dreams. Go and climb your own personal Everest, whatever it might be. I climbed mine – and it changed my life.’

KENTON COOL A mountaineer from Berkshire, who started climbing while in the Scouts, he’s now conquered Everest 13 times, a record for a European climber.

In cycling she won nine world titles and two Olympic golds, and as a jockey she rode her first winner in March 2016. His adventuring began in TV’s Castaway 2000. He’s rowed the Atlantic, walked to the South Pole and run across the Sahara.