TOM AVERY
Tom Avery is the youngest Briton to walk to both Poles. In 2005 he led the international team which broke the World Record and became the fastest in history to reach the North Pole on foot. He has published a book on his South Pole adventure, Pole Dance (Orion, 2004), and is currently writing an account of his record-breaking Arctic expedition. “Avery is shaping up to join the ranks of such British immortals as Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dame Ellen MacArthur,” The Sunday Times.
As one of only 38 people in history to have reached both the North and South Poles on foot, Tom is quickly gaining the reputation as one of Briton’s leading young explorers. He began his outdoor career as mountaineer, leading expeditions to the South American Andes, New Zealand, the Swiss Alps, Morocco and Tanzania.
The highlight of Tom’s climbing career took place in 2000 when he led a ground-breaking British expedition to the previously unexplored Eastern Zaalay Mountains of Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia. The team scaled nine unclimbed and unnamed summits up to 20,000 feet in altitude.
Just days after turning 27, Tom entered the record books in December 2002 by becoming the youngest Briton to ski to the South Pole. His team was confronted with treacherous crevasse fields and blizzards within hours of beginning their 705-mile journey. Frostbite, altitude sickness, broken skis and crevasse falls make their achievement all the more remarkable.
On the rare occasions that the winds blew from the north, his team used state-of-the-art kites to power across the ice, and by covering the last 47 miles to the Pole in a non-stop 31-hour ski, the four men broke the South Pole speed record in a time of 45 days and 6 hours. His highly acclaimed account of the expedition, Pole Dance, was Tom’s first book and published by Orion in 2004.
In April 2005 Tom electrified the exploration world by recreating the American Robert Peary's disputed Arctic expedition of 1909, during which he claimed to have become the first man to stand at the North Pole. Mystery and controversy had surrounded Peary's expedition for nearly a century with most polar experts arguing that his astonishing 37-day journey to the Pole was impossibly fast.
Traveling in a similar style to Peary’s with teams of Canadian Inuit dogs and custom-built wooden sledges, Tom’s team set out from Peary's original Base Camp to prove the sceptics wrong and match his time. After an epic 500-mile journey across the most unforgiving environment on the planet, the exhausted five-strong team rewrote the history books and arrived at the Pole with less than five hours to spare in a new world record time.
Tom now spends his time giving motivational talks to businesses, writing his next book and raising funds for The Prince's Trust, for whom he is an ambassador. He is also an official ambassador of the London 2012 Olympic Games and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
“Avery is shaping up to join the ranks of such British immortals as Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dame Ellen MacArthur.” The Sunday Times