![]() ![]() He’d been in this car accident and had nerve damage. Another climbing legend, John Bachar? He did die free-soloing, but “with extenuating circumstances. What about all the other people mentioned in the film who have died free-soloing – people he knew, such as Ueli Steck? “He died climbing a mountain at 7,000 metres in the snow wearing crampons – it’s a completely different experience,” Honnold says. Honnold knew he wasn’t going to fall off El Capitan because of the practice and preparation. And every single move, every second, you have to be performing perfectly, knowing that if you make a single mistake you would die.” “But the floor routine is four hours long. “The drive and ambition to do something that pushes you, that you love – it’s hard to put that away and not use it.”Ĭhin is in no doubt about what it meant to free-solo El Capitan, which he compares to an Olympic gold medal gymnastics floor routine. “If you had a superpower and you could fly, you would probably do it, right?” he says. A hugely accomplished climber himself, he says he wouldn’t attempt to free-solo a single pitch of El Capitan, but he understands what drove Honnold. I speak to Jimmy Chin, who filmed a lot of Free Solo and co-directed it with his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, after a screening of the documentary. ![]() If you do something for fun all the time, every once in a while you want to have consequences.” “It’s like when I say that climbing is all about fun free soloing is sort of the extreme. “I like the movement, I like swinging, it all feels kinda playful and fun.” But why without a rope, when the stakes are so much higher? He has obviously been asked the question a thousand times before, but he still seems to think about it. Honnold climbs because he loves it he grew up doing it. Honnold at VauxWall East climbing centre in London. If the recreated boulder problem was exactly the same as the real boulder problem, it wouldn’t have been a problem. That – the meticulous practice and preparation – is the key to not falling. He knows every millimetre of this section of El Capitan, practised it 40 or 50 times with a rope before attempting it without. But it’s not quite right: this hold needs to come in a bit, the thumb press presses the wrong way, there shouldn’t be a foothold on the end of the karate kick … He is telling them where everything should be from memory. They have recreated this section of the boulder problem in his honour. There is a buzz about the place among the men and women who work here – imagine Lionel Messi dropping in to your amateur football club. It’s not unlike the climbing wall where he started off in Sacramento, he says. You can’t keep him away from climbing for long, though, even in the city, and this is where he comes when he is in London. It has just won the Oscar for best documentary, after winning a Bafta earlier in the month. It is a brilliant, beautiful film – not just the story of an incredible physical performance (with some of the most buttock-clenchingly tense viewing you’re ever likely to squirm through), but a very human story of a remarkable, beguiling character. Then the film about that climb – Free Solo – came out, and the world outside the climbing community sat up and took note. When, on 3 June 2017, he free-soloed the freerider route on El Capitan, the New York Times described it as “one of the greatest athletic feats of any kind, ever”. With a goofy grin and a bad haircut, he has been fighting a single-handed battle against gravity, and winning. Hahaha.Īlex Honnold, now 33, has been a legend in the sport for a while, with a rack of insane firsts and nobody-will-evers hanging from his harness (except he doesn’t usually wear one of those). So this time he has fallen about two and a half metres on to a crash mat, nothing hurt except a little pride. He is actually in Vauxhall, south London, at a climbing centre where they have tried to recreate the hardest section of the route that Honnold really did climb, alone and without a rope. Not 700 metres to his death, though, which is what would have happened if he was on the real El Cap, in Yosemite, California. But he moves gracefully, balletically even: drive up off the left foot into the thumb press, roll two fingers over the thumb, switch feet, left foot out to a bad sloping foothold, switch thumbs, reach out left to a grainy rounded hold before launching into the karate kick … And that is where he slips and falls. He is at the crux, the most difficult section, known as the boulder problem, the main problem being that it is really, really hard. Alex Honnold is on El Capitan, free-soloing it – meaning no rope, no one else, just a man alone on a wall. The greatest rock climber in the world is climbing the greatest rock in the world. ![]()
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