{"id":540955,"date":"2026-01-25T04:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T04:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/540955\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T04:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T04:04:10","slug":"alex-honnold-successfully-climbs-taipei-101-skyscraper-live-on-netflix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/540955\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Honnold Successfully Climbs Taipei 101 Skyscraper Live on Netflix"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tYou can exhale now: Alex Honnold<\/a> successfully made it to the top of Taipei 101, in a live special on Netflix<\/a>. \u201cSick!\u201d he exclaimed at the top of the tower, after climbing the tower in one hour and 35 minutes. \u201cI\u2019m so psyched!\u201d And then he took a selfie.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe \u201cSkyscraper Live<\/a>\u201d 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 \u2014 and most importantly, lost his in-ear music soundtrack. (Luckily, he eventually got it back.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd then, at one point near the end, Honnold admitted, \u201cYou know what, I am kind of tired.\u201d Later, he also noted how windy it was toward the top. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe thousands of Taipei residents watching on the ground, and the hundreds more inside the Taipei 101 \u2014 taking selfies and waving \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis was a different kind of climb for Honnold, who normally does his feats \u2014 including the one that made him famous scaling Yosemite\u2019s El Capitan for the Oscar-winning doc \u201cFree Solo\u201d \u2014 in solitude. Honnold\u2019s wife Sanni McCandless was on hand too, and she revealed that she generally isn\u2019t in attendance for his climbs either. At the end of the climb, McCandless was waiting for Honnold, and the two shared a long embrace.<\/p>\n

\n\tGiven 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. \u201cSkyscraper Live\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEvery scenario has been mapped out, as you might expect,\u201d Plimsoll CEO Grant Mansfield told Variety in a story published earlier this week<\/a>. \u201cThe main focus has been on keeping Alex safe. This is a building he knows very well. It\u2019s a building which is very well suited for climbing. If at any point he decides that he\u2019s too tired when he\u2019s on the building, we can get him off there as well. But Alex really knows what he\u2019s doing. He\u2019s an extraordinary kind of athlete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn that same story, Netflix unscripted series VP Jeff Gaspin said Netflix did have a contingency plan in place for a worst-case scenario. \u201cIt\u2019s obviously a conversation that everybody has,\u201d Gaspin said. \u201cYou can imagine\u00a0what we\u2019ll do. It\u2019s nothing momentous. We\u2019ll 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\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHonnold 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\u2019s slab base. From there, he got on the building\u2019s middle section, designed like eight-story \u201cbamboo boxes,\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tElle Duncan hosted the special, with commentary and contributions from the WWE\u2019s Seth Rollins, YouTube star Mark Rober and climbers Pete Woods and Emily Harrington. Al Berman is showrunner and executive producer of \u201cSkyscraper Live,\u201d while Honnold, Grant Mansfield, James Smith, Alan Eyres and Jonathan Retseck are also EPs. Joe DeMaio is director.<\/p>\n

\n\tWatch below as Honnold makes his way to the very top of Taipei 101:<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can exhale now: Alex Honnold successfully made it to the top of Taipei 101, in a live…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":540956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5151,171,4659,237896,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-540955","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-alex-honnold","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-netflix","11":"tag-skyscraper-live","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115953759992720700","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}