Alex Honnold reached the top of Taipei 101 on January 25 with nothing but chalk, yellow climbing shoes, and the grip strength that's made him a legend. No ropes. No safety equipment. Just 90 minutes of vertical problem-solving on a 1,667-foot tower that used to be the world's tallest building.
The 40-year-old climber became the first person to free solo the iconic Taiwanese skyscraper—a distinction that matters because others have climbed it before, but never without a lifeline. French climber Alain Robert, who calls himself "Spider-Man," scaled Taipei 101 in 2004, but he was clipped in the whole way. Honnold did it bare.
The 1,667-foot-tall Taipei 101 was once the world's tallest building.
He'd been dreaming about this climb for more than a decade. Netflix's involvement finally made it happen—and they broadcast it live with a ten-second delay, so millions watched in real time as Honnold inched upward in a red T-shirt and black pants, occasionally dipping his hands into a bag of chalk clipped to his waist. He stopped to rest periodically, working his way up a corner of the building with methodical precision, but afterward he told reporters he never felt too exhausted to keep going.
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Start Your News DetoxWhen he reached the spire at the top and started waving his arms, people watching from the street and from inside the 101-story structure erupted in cheers.
Onlookers watched the stunt from the street and from inside the building.
This isn't Honnold's first legendary ascent. In 2017, he free soloed El Capitan—the vertical granite wall in Yosemite that climbers spend years preparing for. But Taipei 101 is different. It's human-made, which means the holds are unpredictable, the angles change, and there's wind at altitude. It's also a symbol, a building that held the title of world's tallest until the Burj Khalifa in Dubai took it in 2010.
After he climbed down, Honnold reflected on what he hoped people would take from watching. "If you work really hard, you can do hard things," he told Netflix, "and maybe they should try." He wasn't talking about free soloing skyscrapers. He was talking about the smaller, more achievable hard things that most of us spend our lives avoiding because they seem impossible until someone does them.
