He is the only person to have scaled El Capitan without protective equipment, and the film about his feat has just won an Oscar. What drives someone to take the ultimate risk?
The greatest rock climber in the world is climbing the greatest rock in the world. Alex Honnold is on El Capitan, free-soloing it – meaning no rope, no one else, just a man alone on a wall. He is at the crux, the most difficult section, known as the boulder problem, the main problem being that it is really, really hard. 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.
Not 700 metres to his death, though, which is what would have happened if he was on the real El Cap, in Yosemite, California. 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. So this time he has fallen about two and a half metres on to a crash mat, nothing hurt except a little pride. “I’m dead,” he laughs. Hahaha.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SWQB0q
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