I hope someday Caldwell switches over to the alpine game.

elcap linkups and freeroutes are uber impressive, and i'd say he's finally done perhaps the ultimate free linkup, but i would like to see him branch out to some more intresting wilderness.

IMO: i'm more impressed by Steve House and Vince Andersons route up the Rupal Face and the couple of recent free routes on Great Trango.

Some people on super-topo are calling him the "greatest free-climber ever!" And calling this one of the "greatest athletic achievements EVER!"

Slow down.
Greatest athletic achievements ever?
This isn't Jesse Owens winning a truckload of gold medals right in Hitler's face. Or Mark Spitz winning 7 gold medals and setting however many world records in the process (1972). It sure as heck ain't Gretzky completely rewriting the hockey record books.

Greatest free-climber ever? Probably not.

How about greatest free-climbing achievement in the past 15+ years?

Even in the realm of free-climbing link-ups, it's not without comparison.

A few examples from recent years:

Dean Potter freed El Cap and Half-Dome in a day. The feat is not at the same level of technical difficulty... but there is more approach/descent travel to get between the two faces. Potter fell once, on the crux of Freerider, at 3AM, after having climbed Half-Dome. To me, this is (at least) a stepping stone towards what Tommy did. Yet I've not seen it mentioned in any of the Tommy-is-God threads.

Mike Pennings and Jeff Hollenbaugh climbed the three major walls of the Black Canyon in a day. Josh Wharton and Thad Friday repeated this feat. Granted, it is at a much lower free standard, but it requires far more arduous/complicated descents etc to complete the linkage.

Link-ups are and have been all the rage in Chamonix for years. There are numerous examples. Christophe Profit garnered a lot of press by soloing the Three Great North Faces of the Alps in 24 hours (this was further back...mid-1980s, I believe).

For a more recent, less related example: Michael Reardon completed the Palisade Traverse in 24 hours. That is mind-blowing. The previous fastest ascent was 7 days. Admittedly, that ascent was not made by "world-class climbers," but still. This gets a paragraph in Hot Flashes and minimal mentioning on the internet. Methinks it deserves far more.

And, an obvious comparison: Lynn Hill freeing the Nose in a day way back in 1994. Let's see if Tommy's feat remains unrepeated for 11 years.

Climbers top the performances of their predecessors. It happens. But look at it with a little context, a little perspective.

I'm not saying that those mentioned above "top" Caldwell's recent performance, but let's not act like there is no one else completing audacious free-climbing and/or link-up feats.

Or, as the Wolf said in Pulp Fiction, "Let's not start sucking each others
d---- just yet."

sport climbing...you mean, like, clipping fixed pro? hangdogging/toproping pitches into submission? leaving gear in place for the redpoint after it's been weighted? sorry, but once you start using sport tactics, you're not trad climbing anymore, you're sport climbing.

I hope someday Caldwell switches over to the alpine game.

elcap linkups and freeroutes are uber impressive, and i'd say he's finally done perhaps the ultimate free linkup, but i would like to see him branch out to some more intresting wilderness.

IMO: i'm more impressed by Steve House and Vince Andersons route up the Rupal Face and the couple of recent free routes on Great Trango.

--The longest-standing world record in the mile was 4:01.4, set by Gunder Haegg of Sweden on July 17, 1945. It stood for eight years, 293 days before Bannister broke it.

Here's what I find exciting about this. After Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile, something like 5 other runners broke 4 minutes that same year. It was the mental barrier that sub 4 could be achieved.