On July 12, 2015, the barracks of the Russian Airborne Forces in Omsk, Siberia, collapsed on 42 soldiers. Rustam Nabiev was 22 years old. He made it out alive, but without both legs. The cause: substandard renovation work carried out a year earlier. Twenty-three of his comrades did not survive.
Six years later, on October 2, 2021, at 10 in the morning, Nabiev touched the summit of Manaslu, 8,163 meters above sea level, the eighth-highest mountain on the planet. He did it without prosthetics, moving forward on his hands with two ice axes for approximately 50 hours, over 35 kilometers and more than 105,000 strikes on the snow and ice of the Himalayas. The full expedition lasted 35 days. No one with a double leg amputation had summited an eight-thousander that way before.
When he reached base camp after the descent, Nabiev admitted that he broke down emotionally and cried for half an hour. He has his motto tattooed on his side: “no excuses”. Today, with nearly 1.4 million followers on Instagram, he is at Everest base camp preparing for his next attempt. The highest mountain in the world is what comes next.
