A challenge is born

Late in 2012, Everesting founder Andy van Bergen came limping into the office after the hardest bike ride he had ever done – some 300 kilometres and nearly 6,000 metres of climbing. His coworkers asked him what he’d gotten up to over the weekend. When he told them, the response was a very underwhelming: “That’s nice. So what else did you do?”

It was then that he knew he needed to come up with a bigger goal, the significance of which even non-cyclists couldn’t miss. Long inspired by mountaineering stories, he soon had his answer. He’d cycle 8,848 vertical metres – the height of Everest – in a single ride. And he’d challenge others to do the same.

The Everesting challenge was born.

decades earlier inspiration

The first known successful Everesting attempt goes to cyclist and mountaineer George Mallory, grandson of George Herbert Leigh Mallory, the British mountaineer who disappeared on Everest with Sandy Irvine in 1924. Seventy years later, the younger Mallory was training to climb Everest himself and rode 10 laps up Mt. Donna Buang, a 1,250m metre peak 80km east of Melbourne in southern Australia. 

When Andy read Mallory’s written account of the ride nearly two decades later, and inspired by the romance of mountaineers of Mallory senior’s era, he made the undertaking an official challenge. At a time when a ride with 5,000m of climbing was enough to get you published, it was no surprise when 65 riders set off into the darkness in secret in February of 2014 to launch ‘Everesting’, the concept not only existed overnight – it instantly exploded.

The term Everesting had entered the cycling lexicon.