EISPIRATEN

If you haven't seen the movie Free Solo, go see it now. There is Alex Honnold hanging onto a few pea size bumps with 3000 feet of air under him. What balls! His climb has been hailed as the greatest athletic feat ever. That might not be hype. What could top it?

RichardK wrote:What could top it?

Hard to say without first defining the criteria for judgment. If I say Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the only perfect game ever thrown in the post-season, you might say, well, baseball is a team sport, while ropeless rock climbing is a solo endeavor. And if I say Laso Schaller's 193-foot cliff jump, you might remind me that that took mere seconds of free-falling, while Honnold spent hours clinging to El Cap. I could go on.

Clearly Honnold has done something unique and amazing in the rock climbing world. And the fear factor might keep followers with equal technical skills from duplicating his achievement. But let's not pretend that his achievement is primarily athletic. It's primarily emotional control and risk-taking. He's basically a rock climbing daredevil. I believe he has said something like this himself: that there are better technical climbers than him, but none who will take the extreme risks that he does.

The movie briefly covered Honnold's father mentioning that the man might have had mild Asperger's syndrome. I have a niece and nephew who are autistic which is along the same spectrum. I see traces of their emotional blunting in Honnold. It might not be that he controls his emotions well. It might be that he just doesn't have them, at least not to the same degree that an average person or even average rock climber might.