Andrzej Bargiel

BIO AND SPORTS CAREER

Andrzej Bargiel was born on April 18, 1988, in Łętownia, near Jordanów in southern Poland.

From an early age he showed a great flair for sports and an irrepressible energy that he felt the need to let off steam by launching himself at breakneck speed into the most unlikely adventures, giving his dad Józef and mom Maria a lot to do and quite a few worries.

The family he comes from is certainly not wealthy, and economic conditions often limit Andrzej's sporting career, as is the case in his high school years, when a promising future as a mountain bike champion is abruptly interrupted by the breakage of his bicycle, which neither his sports club nor his family had the resources to replace...

Fortunately, his older brother Grzesiek involved him in his work as a mountain rescuer in the Białka Tatrzańska village area, where Andrzej discovered a love (and extraordinary talent) for ski mountaineering and steep and extreme descents.

In 2007, at age 19, he won the Polish ski mountaineering championship, and two years later he was third in the Senior World Championship. 2010 saw him take first place in the Elbrus Race, the extremely tough race to the highest peak in the Caucasus, which Andrzej won in an outstanding time, bettering the previous record set by none other than mountaineering legend Denis Urubko.

His dreams, however, point much higher, to the highest and wildest peaks on Earth, which he wants to climb in the "cleanest" way (i.e., without the use of supplemental oxygen) and then descend on his skis, conceiving a grand project christened with the evocative name "Hic sunt leones."

After two attempts stopped by bad weather at Manaslu and Lhotse, in 2013 he finally completed in just 30 hours the ascent of Shisha Pangma and then descended from the summit on skis.

The following year he was at Manaslu: ascended and descended on skis in a record time of just 21 hours and 15 minutes.



In 2015 it took him only 8 hours to go from base camp to the summit of Broad Peak, and another 3 to make the first full ski descent of the mountain.

He needed only 30 days, in 2016, to concatenate the ascent of the five highest peaks in the former Soviet Union, thus winning the prestigious Snow Leopard award.

2018 is the year that definitively establishes him in the legend of mountaineering and extreme skiing: in fact, he becomes the first man in the world to descend with skis on his feet from the summit to the base of K2.

The rest is recent history: in the summer of 2023, Andrzej joined the team of Ferrino ambassadors and celebrated this new collaboration by concatenating in the space of just seven days the ascent and full descent on skis of Gasherbrum II and Gasherbrum I.

A splendid feat and a great stimulus to continue pursuing his dream... still many adventures await him in order to crown the "Hic sunt Leones" project.