Alex Hoyt

2 months ago | nationalgeographic.com | Alex Hoyt

This story is part of the National Geographic 33. The transformation of Héctor Bellerín began a few years ago, when he went vegan. He was a defender playing for Arsenal, in the English Premier League, and he wanted a better way to train and recover. The decision certainly helped his body, but it also expanded his mind. “That opened so many doors,” he says. “I became more sensitive to animal cruelty. I became more conscious of how a meat diet was damaging to the Earth.

2 months ago | nationalgeographic.com | Alex Hoyt

This story is part of the National Geographic 33. The water flowing through the East Antarctic Ice Sheet was nearly as cold as water can be without freezing, just above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, yet Lewis Pugh wore only a Speedo, goggles, and a swim cap. He felt extremely fit, but he’d also bulked up slightly to keep himself warm on this unprecedented quest: swimming down a half-mile river that tunneled through the shifting glacial ice.

Mar 18, 2025 | nationalgeographic.com | Alex Hoyt

The son of nomadic sheep farmers and a member of Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority, Hamdi Ulukaya was the first in his family to go to college, enrolling at Ankara University. It was the early nineties, a time of heightened tensions between government forces and Kurdish separatists, and Ulukaya founded a newspaper in which he called out the human rights abuses faced by his fellow Kurds. One day, he recalls, he was taken into police custody.

Mar 18, 2025 | nationalgeographic.com | Alex Hoyt

A pioneer of big-mountain snowboarding, Jeremy Jones watched as helicopters made remote backcountry runs suddenly reachable, enabling access to lines that had once been unfathomably remote. “We would get dropped in the mountains and link up these runs where you hike and ride and hike and ride,” he says. “I was like, Oh my God, this is where I need to be.” But he had misgivings about the means of ascent. “I knew, when I got in a helicopter, I was taking up resources,” he says.

Mar 18, 2025 | nationalgeographic.com | Alex Hoyt

When Tayshan Hayden-Smith was growing up with his three siblings in London public housing, he dreamed of playing for Arsenal, the famous football club, and the family’s small garden became his pitch. He honed his skills dribbling between his mother’s rosebushes and lavender plants, his shots careening off her avocado tree. “It was like the garden versus football,” he recalls.