Pride of Britain winner Hari Budha Magar MBE is nothing short of extraordinary. Born in a cowshed, he lost his legs to a bomb in Afghanistan… then was the first double below the knee amputee to climb the tallest peak in the world. And his next challenge is about to begin…
Growing up in a remote village in Nepal, Hari Budha Magar heard stories about Mount Everest and as a boy had wild dreams of climbing the famous peak. So when he successfully summited the world’s highest mountain in 2023, he could scarcely believe it himself. The feat was made even more incredible due to the fact that Hari is a double above knee amputee, so climbed all 8849m on prosthetic legs.
“The Nepalese people are proud of three things: Everest, Nepal being the birthplace of Lord Buddha, and being the home of the Gurkhas,” says Hari, 46, a mountaineer and disability campaigner who lives in Canterbury, Kent with his wife Urmila, a stay at home mum. He has three children, daughter Samjhana, and sons Brian, and Ublan. Born in a cowshed overlooking Nepalese mountains Dhaulagiri and Sisne, Hari’s family were poor farmers. He didn’t have flip flops so had to walk 45 mins to and from school every day barefoot. At 11 Hari’s parents found him a bride and he married (his parents would later separate them when he was 22 after realising the couple were incompatible) and at 17 he became a dad to Samjhana.
READ MORE: Pride of Britain hero exchanges epic Everest for fantastic fjords
Aged 19, as civil war descended on Nepal and ravaged his country, Hari joined the Gurkhas. “It was a horrific time. Brothers turned on brothers, neighbours turned into each other, 17,000 people in Nepal were killed, including 21 from my village as I left,” he says. He applied to join the British Army and was selected in 230 out of 12,000 applicants, and for the next 15 years served the United Kingdom in five continents, in Brunei, Kosovo, the Falklands and more.
He moved to the UK from Brunei in 2009 with Urmila. The couple have two children together, Brian and Ublan. Then, in 2010, two weeks into a tour in Afghanistan, during a foot patrol an IED exploded underneath Hari and he lost both his legs. He says: “I looked down and saw one of my legs was gone. The other was hanging by the skin and bone.”
Fellow soldiers fought to save Hari, and thankfully a helicopter was 10 minutes out. “I felt no pain at all at first. But when they tightened the tourniquets, it was excruciating,” he remembers. 22 days followed in hospital, then Hari was allowed home. But there, Hari suffered from PTSD and struggled to cope with what had happened to him.
“I tried to take my own life. I thought my wife would leave me. Why would she stay with someone like me? I was broken. I thought the children would be ashamed. What use was I to anyone? I began to drink a lot every day and became an alcoholic. I’d wake up feeling awful but think it’s okay, it’ll die soon, it’ll be over.” Two years in the wilderness followed for Hari as he battled his demons.
But then a chance day out in 2012 changed everything. “I took up the opportunity to go skydiving. I thought, half of me is already gone, what does it matter about the other half,” says Hari. “But when I was about to jump, I felt something – fear. I realised I didn’t want to die and in fact I was very scared of the prospect indeed. It sparked something in me I hadn’t felt for years – hope.”
Determined to get better, Hari threw himself into research. “I looked into all the things disabled people could actually do – I tried all the Paralympic sports. And as I tried them. I found myself getting fitter and fitter, my mind stronger and stronger. I realised that I could do almost anything I wanted, just with a little adaptation.
“And in the back of my mind I had a thought… what if I could climb Everest.” The fascination Hari had as a child came back. At first I didn’t tell anyone about my dream, not even my wife. I thought people would think I was mad. Me? No way,” he says. But when he began to open up and share his idea, sponsors, his communities and charities listened.
There was a catch, however. At the time, Nepalese law forbid double amputees from climb any mountain over 6,500m which includes Everest. “Disabled people are always being told what they can’t do,” says Hari. “It’s too dangerous, something might happen. Well Everest is perilous with or without a disability, and I know what I’m capable of.”
He campaigned and helps to fight a case in the Supreme Court in Nepal – and they won. It was game on. And in the meantime, armed with specially designed prosthetics that could walk on ice and snow, Hari practiced climbing some of the tallest peaks in the world. He became the first double above the knee amputee to summit a peak higher than 6000m (Mera Peak in Nepal at 6476m). Then came successful climbs of Mt Blanc in France and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
Then, in 2023, it was time to tackle Everest. “It was really tough. We had to wait a month at base camp because weather conditions were too bad and so we could acclimatise to altitude,” says Hari. “It was a hard season that saw 17 people die climbing Everest, the most ever in one season,” says Hari. “Three guys died in an ice fall before we even arrived at base camp, four people died on the day we summited.
“The mountain takes no prisoners, it’s brutal even for the fittest person. It takes the fastest person around eight hours from camp four to summit, but it took me 25. It takes three times longer and I use three times more energy than an able bodied person. I was absolutely exhausted. But I couldn’t give up, if I gave up I’d die. You walk past dead people on your way up and down. There’s only so much oxygen that you can carry, and if runs out – that’s it. It’s so hard to rescue people. If someone said they’d give you a million pounds for your oxygen you’d say no.”
Standing at the summit in May 2023, Hari broke down. “It was windy and cold. I cried – we did it! But then I knew we had to go back down, I had half way to go again to be safe. We were running out of oxygen, it was getting late. We started at 9.50pm in the evening and arrived back at camp four at 11pm the night after.”
Hari now dedicates his life to proving just how much people living with a disability can do. He says: “There are 1.3 billion disabled people in this world. I don’t want other people to lose years of their life struggling like I did. And I want governments around the world to know that banning us from the things that we love to do – like climbing Everest as a double amputee – isn’t the answer. Supporting us the right way is. We can live a meaningful life like anyone else. That’s what drives me forward.”
In 2024, Hari was awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for his services to disability awareness. Later that year, the Mirror met him for the first time when he won a Pride of Britain Award and he and his family were invited to Downing Street to meet Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer as a result.
“It’s been such an honour and an incredible experience, to be in a room full of those incredible winners at the Pride of Britain Awards was humbling,” says Hari. But there’s no rest for the wicked, as he is about to embark on his latest challenge: climbing Mt. Vinson, the highest peak in Antarctica, to complete the 7 Summits challenge, the climb of each highest peak of each continent of the world. He hopes to raise the height of Mt. Everest plus two 00’s [£884,900], for five amazing charities: Gurkha Welfare Trust, BLESMA, Pilgrim Bandits, On Course Foundation and Team Forces.
“When practicing for the Everest climb, I realised that I’d already climbed three of them,” says Hari. So Denali in Alaska followed in June 2024, then Aconcagua in Argentina in February this year, and Puncak Jaya in New Guinea in October. His final expedition of the challenge, to summit Vinson in Antarctica, launches this week.
Hari will leave the UK on Dec 24th, begins the trek on Jan 1 and hopes to summit on January 6 or 7. Hero Hari plans to plant a Mirror flag on the top of the mountain, and we wish him all the luck in the world for his trip. We’ll bring you the full story exclusively once he’s done.
“I want to show that anything is possible,” says Hari. I’m still a human being – I just have a couple of limbs missing. Who is perfect? I wasn’t perfect when I had legs. I may have a weakness but it doesn’t mean I can’t do anything.”
Next year will see Hari put pen to paper for the release of his debut book, which will tell his incredible story, published by Mirror Books. And one day he hopes there may even be a film. “I’m waiting for the call…” he jokes. Hari has certainly achieved the impossible, and he’s full of gratitude.
“I do it too for the soldiers who saved me. It’s incredibly dangerous to help someone on the battlefield, and they risked their life to save mine. So now when I achieve something with my life, it’s for them too, to show them it was worth it.”
*You can support Hari’s incredible appeal, and donate HERE
READ MORE: Girl, 5, who lost limbs to sepsis has Carol Vorderman in tears at Mirror Pride of Britain Awards
