TAIPEI, Taiwan — Alex Honnold scaled Taipei 101 without ropes or safety gear in a made-for-streaming stunt that Netflix carried live to a global audience, Jan. 25, 2026. The 508-meter (1,667-foot) climb took about 91 minutes and reignited a familiar question around free soloing: When the margin for error is zero, what does it mean to turn risk into a broadcast?
Honnold, wearing a red short-sleeve shirt, started from the base of the 101-story tower and worked upward using small architectural edges, cutouts and balcony breaks as rest points, Reuters reported. As he topped out on the spire, Honnold summed up the moment with one word: “Sick,” according to the same report.
Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 free solo, by the numbers
The event was billed as a live, real-time special and was postponed because of weather, with the broadcast timing framed for U.S. viewers a day earlier than local Taipei time, according to Netflix Tudum’s viewing guide. The climb itself drew cheers from spectators gathered on the street below, while the platform’s coverage leaned into the tension of a climb where a slip would almost certainly be fatal.
At the top, Honnold acknowledged the conditions in a brief on-camera moment: “It’s windy,” he said before taking a selfie, adding that he was “pretty tired,” CBS News reported. The Associated Press said the live stream ran with a short delay, a precaution that underscored how tightly the production balanced spectacle with the reality of what viewers were watching.
“What a view, it’s incredible,” Honnold said afterward, describing the wind and the exposure near the top, the AP reported. The climb’s most punishing stretch, the AP said, came through the tower’s distinctive midsection “bamboo boxes,” where steep, overhanging segments forced sustained pulling and careful footwork.
Alex Honnold’s long arc from El Capitan to live TV
For many fans, Alex Honnold’s name remains inseparable from Yosemite’s El Capitan, which he free-soloed in 2017 in under four hours — a milestone that made him a household name far beyond climbing, as The Guardian reported at the time. A deeper account of the planning and the meaning of “free solo” — climbing without ropes or safety gear — later detailed the obsessive preparation behind that attempt, National Geographic reported.
That El Capitan story became mainstream cinema, culminating in the documentary “Free Solo” winning an Academy Award in 2019, as Outside noted. Taipei 101, then, wasn’t a sudden pivot as much as a new stage: the same calculated, rehearsed approach, but framed for a live audience.
Taipei 101 has been climbed before — most famously by French climber Alain Robert during the building’s opening-era media blitz in 2004, when he used a safety rope and took nearly four hours, The Spokesman-Review reported. Honnold’s ascent differed in the detail that matters most to climbers: no rope, no harness, and no way to make a mistake.
Whether Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 climb becomes a template for more live, extreme broadcasts may depend less on the ratings than on what happens next — with organizers, city officials and climbers weighing what’s possible against what should be televised.
