There are plenty of ways to get your heart rate up without leaving the couch. Dragons torching villages in Game of Thrones. A shark fin slicing through calm water in Jaws. The final over of a World Cup. A last-second three at the buzzer. Sport and cinema have spent decades perfecting the art of the edge-of-your-seat moment.
And then along comes Alex Honnold, free-climbing Taipei 101, casually detonating the entire concept of “dramatic tension.”
This wasn’t a rope-and-harness, double-check-your-knots kind of climb. This was free solo. No safety net. No second chances. One slip and gravity collects its debt in full. Suddenly, every nail-biting sporting comeback in history feels like a warm-up act.
Watching Honnold scale one of the tallest buildings on the planet is less “Netflix and chill” and more “Netflix and hyperventilate.” Every five minutes brings the same internal negotiation: Turn this off. Put on a sitcom. Watch something where the worst-case scenario is a bad joke. But the remote never quite makes it back to the coffee table. You’re hooked. Palms sweating. Legs pacing. Eyes half-covered, peeking through your fingers just to make sure his hands and feet are still, somehow, defying physics.
And then there’s Honnold himself, the most unsettling part of the entire experience. Hundreds of metres in the air, no rope, no margin for error—and he’s waving at people inside the building like he’s stuck in traffic, not dangling above a very long way down. Smiling. Relaxed. Looking like a guy who’s just popped out for a coffee, not a man engaged in a personal duel with gravity.
That’s the Honnold effect. He’s not just a daredevil; he’s disarmingly likeable. Grounded—pardon the pun—in a way that makes you forget, momentarily, that his hobby is doing things most humans wouldn’t attempt in a video game. His GQ Sports video breaking down famous climbing scenes in movies shows the same charm: equal parts expert, enthusiast, and quietly amused by how Hollywood gets it wrong.
So naturally, you find yourself rooting for him like he’s in a grand final. Not just hoping he finishes the climb, but needing him to. Because once you’ve committed to watching, you’re emotionally invested in every fingertip and foothold.
Which brings us to the inevitable post-climb debate that lit up timelines everywhere: where does Alex Honnold rank among the greatest athletes of all time?
The usual names get thrown around. Jordan. Brady. Tiger. Legends with rings, trophies, and highlight reels that live forever. Fair enough. Greatness has many scoreboards.
But free solo climbing operates on a different scale entirely. Miss a free throw in basketball, you live to shoot another. Misjudge a corner in Formula One or MotoGP, and modern safety tech might still let you walk away. In Honnold’s world, there is no safety tech. No backup plan. No “we’ll get them next game.”
There’s only the wall, the sky, and the very real possibility that a mistake ends everything.
So maybe the debate isn’t about who has the most titles or the biggest legacy. Maybe it’s about guts. About courage. About willingly stepping into a moment where the stakes aren’t a championship, a contract, or a reputation—but your life.
On that particular scoreboard, watching a man wave from the side of Taipei 101 like he’s on a balcony instead of a vertical runway to oblivion, Alex Honnold feels pretty hard to beat.
