Tina Sjögren

Tina Sjögren is the first woman to have completed the Three Poles Challenge − climbing Mount Everest and going to the North and South Poles − in 2002.[1]

She was borne in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on 26 May 1959 and, at age 9, left the country with her mother and brother as political refugees. She ended up in Sweden, where she met the Swedish competitive figure skater Tom Sjögren, at a university in Stockholm. In 1983, after graduating from college, the couple married.[2][3] They emigrated to New York City in 1996.[4]

In 1999, Tina and Tom Sjögren (known as T&T) summited Mount Everest,[5] becoming the second married couple to do so.[6] They then broke the record of high altitude broadcasting.

In November 2002, they were the first to broadcast live pictures and sounds from the Antarctic ice cap.[7] On February 2, 2002, they reached the South Pole after 63 days of skiing. On 29 May 2002, just four months after having returned from Antarctica, they reached the North Pole completely autonomously at record speed (118 days), and transmitted the first ever live broadcast of satellite images and sounds from the Arctic pack ice.

In addition to traveling together, spouses Tina and Tom are also business partners and co-founders of ExplorersWeb.com, a business that provides news about expeditions via a network of websites, technical advice, and software, and rents and sells equipment. Through their ExplorersWeb.com subsidiary, HumanEdgeTech, the Sjögrens developed the software called Contact, which allows users to send images, video clips, and text directly to their Web pages, eliminating the need to send an e-mail message or attachment to a webmaster or other intermediary, to make posts or uploads.[8][9] The couple also collaborated with web developers to created an app titled Pythom, that combines extreme traveling reports and an online store for extreme gear.[10]