We’ve always known he was cool, but this is getting ridiculous.
Prince Harry is going to walk to the South Pole in November.
Yes, really, you read that correctly. The third-in-line (for now) is going to join an extreme adventure with his buddies from the injured servicemen’s charity Walking With The Wounded and schlep his royal ass to the most southerly point on the globe.
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It's definitely the most insane challenge ever undertaken by a senior member of the royal family.
Harry is expected to make the formal announcement when he attends a Walking With The Wounded fundraiser on Friday night. His spokespeople declined to speak on the record when asked for an official comment today, but they didn’t deny the rumour either.
In March 2011, Harry joined the first three days of a walk to the North Pole but couldn’t participate in the whole expedition as it clashed with a rather important wedding he was obliged to attend. He did, however, leap into a hole in the ice in his ski suit to prove he was up for it, and spoke at the time of how much he would like to join one of the trips in the future. The high-profile expeditions, which have also included a failed attempt to scale Everest, raise the profile of the charity and funds for Walking With the Wounded's work rehabilitating injured servicemen.
"When Harry flew back from Afghanistan he was on an aircraft with several wounded soldiers," Ed Parker, who co-founded the charity, told The Telegraph. "That had a real, lasting impact on him. He spent 12 hours with these men on the plane and realized how much their lives have changed, and I think that's part of his motivation in supporting the charity's work."
The four members of the South Pole team will be announced on Friday as Team Glenfiddich, after the whisky brand sponsoring the expedition. They will embark in November on a 205-mile ski to the south pole. Who knows, they might even get to stop off at the last outpost of empire, the Falkland Islands, on the way home?
The expedition will be run as a race, with the British team competing against a squad from the USA and a group from the Commonwealth countries of Canada and Australia. Harry will meet some of the other participants on his official visit to the US in May.
