A group of cricket enthusiasts from United Kingdom wrote their names on the world record books for highest game of cricket ever played and the highest altitude ever recorded for a field sports by completing a Twenty20 game at Gorak Shep, near Mount Everest on Tuesday.
The team of 50 amateurs and enthusiasts trekked nine-day before staging the match at 16,945 feet height (5,160 meters).
Team Hillary beat Team Tenzing by 36 runs with six balls remaining after locals helped prepare the pitch by moving stones, pebbles and rocks.
Team Hillary captain Glen Lowis was quoted as saying: “It has been truly one of the most memorable experiences of my life, I cannot thank all of the people involved enough.”
The Nokia Maps Everest Test was inspired two years ago when cricket-mad expedition leader Richard Kirtley, 28, noticed that Gorak Shep, the highest plateau of its size in the world, bore a striking resemblance to the Oval cricket ground in south London, according to CNN.
“When I looked at it, I was struck that it was perfectly cricket field-sized and I assumed they must use it as a pitch,” he said.
“So I asked a few of the locals, but no one had ever thought about doing it. That´s when I came up with the idea. I came back and floated it to a few people I knew, and it´s grown from there.”
The record still needs to be ratified by Guinness World Records, which currently does not have an entry for highest altitude for a field sport.
The ´explorers´ expect to raise £250,000 for charity with their teams named after New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay who became the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest in May 1953.