You can exhale now: Alex Honnold successfully made it to the top of Taipei 101, in a live special on Netflix. “Sick!” he exclaimed at the top of the tower, after climbing the tower in one hour and 35 minutes. “I’m so psyched!” And then he took a selfie.
The “Skyscraper Live” climb, which started a bit after 8 p.m. ET (9 a.m. Sunday morning Taipei time) appeared to be mostly a piece of cake for Honnold, with a few hiccups: Mostly, he appeared to lose audio contact with his team at a few points — and most importantly, lost his in-ear music soundtrack. (Luckily, he eventually got it back.)
And then, at one point near the end, Honnold admitted, “You know what, I am kind of tired.” Later, he also noted how windy it was toward the top.
The thousands of Taipei residents watching on the ground, and the hundreds more inside the Taipei 101 — taking selfies and waving — cheered and gasped as Honnold made it through each step of the 1,667-feet skyscraper that is the 11th tallest building in the world.
This was a different kind of climb for Honnold, who normally does his feats — including the one that made him famous scaling Yosemite’s El Capitan for the Oscar-winning doc “Free Solo” — in solitude. Honnold’s wife Sanni McCandless was on hand too, and she revealed that she generally isn’t in attendance for his climbs either. At the end of the climb, McCandless was waiting for Honnold, and the two shared a long embrace.
Given the complexity of climbing a major skyscraper without any ropes or safety nets, Netflix and producers Plimsoll Prods. Ltd. worked closely with Honnold and risk management firm Secret Compass to plan out a meticulous set of safety protocols. “Skyscraper Live” was originally scheduled to take place the previous day (Saturday morning in Taipei, Friday night in the U.S.), but weather conditions forced Honnold and the production team to postpone by a day.
“Every scenario has been mapped out, as you might expect,” Plimsoll CEO Grant Mansfield told Variety in a story published earlier this week. “The main focus has been on keeping Alex safe. This is a building he knows very well. It’s a building which is very well suited for climbing. If at any point he decides that he’s too tired when he’s on the building, we can get him off there as well. But Alex really knows what he’s doing. He’s an extraordinary kind of athlete.”
In that same story, Netflix unscripted series VP Jeff Gaspin said Netflix did have a contingency plan in place for a worst-case scenario. “It’s obviously a conversation that everybody has,” Gaspin said. “You can imagine what we’ll do. It’s nothing momentous. We’ll cut away. We have a 10-second delay. Nobody expects or wants to see anything like that to happen. But we will cut away, and it’s as simple as that.”
Honnold spent a great deal of time in recent months preparing for the Taipei 101 climb, including practice climbs of the tower. The Taipei 101 climb started with Honnold crefully making his way up the tower’s slab base. From there, he got on the building’s middle section, designed like eight-story “bamboo boxes,” which required steep climbing over these overhanging sections. On the corner of those boxes are dragon figures, which Honnold mounted to get to the next level. The top part of Taipei 101 had overhanging sections where Honnold’s legs were dangling, and he used his upper body strength to scale up. He climbed a swinging ladder (moving due to heavy winds) to the very top, featuring a small, four-foot platform where he was truly the highest man in all of Taiwan.
Elle Duncan hosted the special, with commentary and contributions from the WWE’s Seth Rollins, YouTube star Mark Rober and climbers Pete Woods and Emily Harrington. Al Berman is showrunner and executive producer of “Skyscraper Live,” while Honnold, Grant Mansfield, James Smith, Alan Eyres and Jonathan Retseck are also EPs. Joe DeMaio is director.
Watch below as Honnold makes his way to the very top of Taipei 101:
