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<\/p>\nRichard Parks\u2019 hardest climb happened long before he first summited a mountain.<\/p>\n
In 2009, the polar athlete, then 31, was a professional rugby player at the top of his game. The Welshman had lived and breathed the sport since he was 11, and his dreams weren\u2019t just in reach\u2014they were at hand.<\/p>\n
Then, an injury and a career-ending surgery changed everything.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The] surgeon told me I’d never play rugby again,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt was just devastating. It was as if I fell off the edge of a cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was the loss of a sport he loved and a life he\u2019d imagined, of course, but also of his identity. \u00a0\u201cWales is a very proud, very small country. We’re good at a lot of things, but we are a very proud rugby nation,\u201d says Parks. \u201cI had been Richard Parks the Rugby Player. And if I wasn’t that person, who was I? And what value did I have?\u201d<\/p>\n
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Richard Parks playing for the Celtic Warriors during their Heinekin Cup Pool Six match at the Causeway Stadium, High Wycombe.<\/p>\n
David Davies\/PA Images, Alamy<\/p>\n
Weeks of depression followed. But he found inspiration close to home\u2014on his own body, in fact\u2014with a tattoo inked two years earlier that honored a phrase he\u2019d heard at his grandmother\u2019s funeral: \u201cThe horizon is only the limit of our sight.\u201d \u00a0He also turned to a book that he\u2019d been reading after his surgery: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, an autobiography by the British polar explorer and mountaineer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. The thought of exceeding personal limits and tackling new adventures connected with his professional-athlete mindset and set in motion a new goal: to climb the seven highest mountains in the world.<\/p>\n
(Arctic obsession drove explorers to seek the North Pole.<\/a>)<\/p>\n \u201cI was looking for a way out of that dark place, and that was it,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn’t want something easy, because I wanted the test. I needed a cognitive challenge. I needed an emotional challenge. I needed a physical challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, in the first episode of National Geographic\u2019s series Pole to Pole with Will Smith<\/a>\u2014premiering January 13 on National Geographic and streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu\u2014Parks welcomes the Academy Award-winning actor to Antarctica and introduces him to some of the most adventurous experiences of his life. It\u2019s the latest undertaking for Parks\u2014who, in addition to his adventuring, is a filmmaker, author, and father\u2014in a life where record-breaking feats are nothing new.<\/p>\n An unbreakable drive<\/p>\n In 2011, just two years after his injury, Parks achieved his goal and became the first person<\/a> to complete all seven summits and stand on both the North and South poles in the same calendar year. The feat is known as the Explorer\u2019s Grand Slam, and he accomplished it in less than seven months. \u00a0<\/p>\n Three years later, he became the first person of color to ski solo<\/a>, unsupported and unassisted, to the South Pole\u2014an approximately 746-mile, 29-day journey from Hercules Inlet.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of four Guinness World records he\u2019s been awarded. \u00a0The others are for the greatest aggregate distance skied solo and unsupported<\/a> in Antarctica; completing the most solo, unsupported journeys<\/a> in Antarctica; and the fastest completion<\/a> of the Explorer\u2019s Grand Slam by a male. He\u2019s equally proud that every expedition he has done includes a legacy component, whether working with university students to develop equipment or raising funds for charities.<\/p>\n
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