First man with AS scales world's highest mountain

Hope ignited

The teenage boy fell into a deep depression and became suicidal due to continuous pain and desperation, that is, until he watched the movie Forrest Gump at school and was inspired. "I wanted to run like Gump and I wanted a fulfilling life as well," he recalled.

Spurred on by the movie, Wang joined the school's athletic team and started running every morning despite the pain.

After four years, to his surprise, he grew much stronger and ran faster than most of his teammates. At the same time, he performed well in his study and became a computer science major at Chongqing University, one of the top universities in China.

There he fell in love with cycling and founded the first cycling club of the university. He has cycled from Chongqing to Sanya in Hainan province (1,800 kilometers), Beijing (2,100 km) and Lhasa, Tibet autonomous region (2,800 km).

As a father of a son and a daughter, Wang established an outdoor club for young people in 2013 to help more kids get close to nature. After seven years of training and practice, he became a national-level outdoor instructor with the Chinese Mountaineering Association in 2019.

But his disease never left him. In 2021, a medical check found that his spine had several old fractures and was about to break. The doctor told him that one fall could make him a paraplegic, and suggested surgery.

The surgery was a success. As his hunched spine was straightened by 18 titanium-alloy pins, Wang was 12 centimeters taller and his lung capacity increased by 30 percent after his chest cavity was widened. After some rest, he found himself much stronger and physically more prepared to realize his dream of scaling the highest mountain in the world.

Last September, he conquered Mount Manaslu, the eighth-highest mountain in the world at 8,163 meters, in order to meet the requirement to climb Mount Qomolangma.