‘Aim high and find a way,’ American rock climber Alex Honnold said casually before beginning a no-rope, no-net, no-parachute, pass-or-fail climb up Taipei 101 – broadcast live globally.
Looking up at the skyscraper, he sounded more amused than intimidated. ‘What a building,’ he remarked, as if appraising a tempting rock face rather than a 508-metre structure engineered to withstand typhoons and earthquakes.
There was, he admitted, no room for error. For over a decade, Honnold has made a career of operating with almost no margin for mistake. This climb made that reality impossible to ignore.
He has wanted to climb things for as long as he can remember. He began rock climbing at around ten, and has since free-soloed thousands of rock faces – in the Arctic, the jungle, the desert. Yet this, he admitted, was new. He had never free-soloed a skyscraper.
Dreams rise vertically
Taipei 101 lodged itself in his imagination. A lifelong dream, he called it. But for Honnold, dreams seem to rise vertically. For nearly 90 minutes, viewers across the world watched him repeat the same movements again and again. There was no dramatic editing, no compression, no safety of hindsight. Live television supplied its own tension – the knowledge that if something went wrong, there would be no cutaway.
Below, spectators stared upward, phones raised. Online, viewers drifted away briefly, only to be jolted back by a pause, a shift of weight, a moment when the body seemed to hover against gravity. The mind, unable to sustain panic indefinitely, oscillated between awe and dread.
As the climb progressed, the building asserted itself. Taipei 101 does not merely rise; it escalates. Near the top, as the structure narrowed and tilted outward, the ascent became visibly harsher.
Fear, managed but never absent
Honnold does not deny the fear. ‘Fear is an ever-present part of climbing,’ he said, adding with a laugh that barely softened the truth: climbing without a rope means that if you fall, you die. ‘Obviously, that’s scary.’
What has changed, he says, is not the fear itself, but his ability to manage it – to keep it from interfering with movement.
From the sidelines, his wife Sanni offered the kind of advice only someone deeply familiar with such risk can give. Not reassurance, not alarm. Just ‘be tranquilo’. No last-minute doubts.
At the edge of gravity
When Honnold finally stood upright at the summit, the tension broke and applause followed. The collective exhale was almost audible.
Yet the climb leaves behind an unease that lingers beyond the summit. Because what sustained attention was not merely athletic excellence, but jeopardy – the possibility, quietly acknowledged, that the broadcast might end differently.
And now comes the inevitable speculation. Burj Khalifa. Taller, smoother, and less forgiving. A building already conquered by cinema, with wires and visual effects standing in for courage. Real life offers no such buffers.
Whether Honnold attempts the 828-metre Dubai icon or not, Taipei has already posed an uncomfortable question. Not about what one man can do, but about what we are willing to watch when the margin between mission accomplished and mission impossible is measured in millimetres.
(Skyscraper Live is now streaming on Netflix.)
