Climbing a 508m Skyscraper Without Safety Gear: What Does Netflix Stunt Mean for Climbing?
- Climbing a 508-meter skyscraper without safety gear: what does the Netflix stunt mean for the sport of climbing?
- Being crazy doesn't hurt, climber Alex Honnold must have thought.
- It seems like a scene from an American action movie, but for Alex Honnold it's becoming reality.
Climbing a 508-meter skyscraper without safety gear: what does the Netflix stunt mean for the sport of climbing?
Being crazy doesn’t hurt, climber Alex Honnold must have thought. The American is climbing a skyscraper in Taiwan on Saturday morning, but that didn’t seem extreme enough.Honnold is doing it without any safety gear at all. “It’s a milestone in the discipline,” says Olympic sport climber Hannes Van Duysen.
Climbing a 508-meter skyscraper without safety gear. It seems like a scene from an American action movie, but for Alex Honnold it’s becoming reality.
Saturday morning (at 2 a.m. Belgian time) he will tackle the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. And the American will do so without being attached to a rope. Don’t try this at home, we dare to think aloud.
Honnold is trying it anyway. He is, after all, not new to this. “He is somewhat of an icon in the climbing world,” says Hannes Van Duysen, who competed for our contry at the 2024 Olympic Games in sport climbing.
“It’s not necessarily high in terms of climbing level, but especially the way he climbs. He climbs breathtaking places without safety gear. A few years ago, he did El Capitan like this, a rock about 900 meters high.”
honnold was the first ever to climb El Capitan ‘free solo’.
Different than El Capitan
A documentary film was even made about that adventure on the rock face in California: Free Solo. According to Van Duysen, who himself enjoys climbing challenging rocks (with safety gear), that…