However, at many times throughout the climb, "it all kept cutting out anyway," Alex recounted, "and I couldn’t really hear and I was kind of like, ‘Whatever. I’m just doing my thing.’”
And in those moments the 40-year-old—who is the only person to have free soloed the 3,000-foot El Capitan in Yosemite National Park—did lose his music, he had another soundtrack backing his climb: the gasps and cheers from the assembled crowd.
As for whether the reactions were distracting, Alex reflected, “I think it was actually kind of motivating or enlivening. This is probably true for all athletes in mainstream sports, when people play and the crowds are roaring.”
In fact, it gave the climber—who is dad to two kids with wife Sanni McCandless—an experience to which he isn’t accustomed.
“As a climber, you never experience that,” he explained. “I was like, ‘No wonder when people are playing in the Super Bowl, it must be super motivating.’ It was my first taste of something like that.”
That isn’t the only comparison Alex made between his climb—which was streamed on Netflix—and professional leagues like the NFL. For the Free Solo star, he knows his mid-six figure paycheck for the climb doesn’t quite compare to what some other athletes make.
"Actually, if you put it in the context of mainstream sports, it’s an embarrassingly small amount," he told the New York Times in an interview published Jan. 23. "You know, Major League Baseball players get like $170 million contracts. Like, someone you haven’t even heard of and that nobody cares about."
Yet, for Alex, his climbs are never about the money—especially not Taipei 101, which made history as made history as the highest free solo climb of an urban structure in history.
"If there was no TV program and the building gave me permission to go do the thing,” he explained, “I would do the thing because I know I can, and it’d be amazing.”
For more on athlete’s sky-high paychecks, read on.
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