Netflix didn't hold back on covering Alex Honnold's record-breaking feat. Elle Duncan, who hosted the January 25th "Skyscraper Live" stream of his Taipei 101 climb in Taiwan, shared that a member of the production crew handed her a notecard of what to say on air if the athlete fell and died during the challenge. "There's something to be said when five minutes before you go on air, someone slides you a card of what you're gonna say if a person falls off the building and dies," Elle said during a January 29th episode of the "Awful Announcing" podcast. "That was certainly not an experience I had ever had before."
And that wasn't the only failsafe the streaming platform had in place. The sports anchor shared that they also filmed Honnold's 101-story climb on a 10-second delay so the cameras would have time to end the broadcast in the event of a disaster. "I had a card on my lap that basically was like, 'We’ve experienced a fall and we’re going to get off air now and we will update you as soon as we can on Alex’s condition,'" she recalled. "They were going to cut away."
Elle noted that the crew were instructed to "cut away to something very wide so obviously we wouldn’t watch him fall." She added, "Then I was going to pop on camera and I was going to make that statement, then we were going to get off air." In the end, Honnold successfully completed his ascent, and Elle wound up making some history of her own, becoming the only person who has ever served as a play-by-play announcer for a free solo climb.
However, the 42-year-old recognized that not everyone was totally happy with her accomplishment. Indeed, she also responded to critics who claimed she spoke over too many of the tense moments. "I watched it back, and I was like, 'I was at a 10,'" she said. "I was very anxious, and I think that it showed in a way that I didn’t feel like when I was doing it."
Admitting that she probably didn't "need to sell the drama" so much, Elle continued, "The drama is this dude’s doing this crazy thing—look at these incredible images—that’s really all that I need." She added, "I didn’t need to paint that picture, but I didn’t know that going in."
