When I worked at a climbing gym in 2012, we used to do screenings of the Reel Rock film tour. We'd hang a giant screen from the overhanging wall and throw the series up with a projector. I remember the first Reel Rock I ever worked featured an Alex Honnold film Honnold 3.0.
It was a short time after the viral 60 Minutes special featuring his terrifying solo of El Cap and the film fleshed out a lot of those details. Watching the film, one thing was clear: this dude makes soloing look cool as hell. After the screening, no less than half a dozen climbers started immediately trying to solo the slab wall. People were coming into the gym to buy books about free climbing (which of course probably disappointed them) citing Honnold as inspiration. Among the climbing community there exists a meme wherein any time you mention to a non-climber that you climb they immediately ask if you've A) seen the movie Free Solo and B) ever soloed. This is barely a joke.
This isn't to say that the attractiveness of soloing portrayed in many of the films featuring them is going to necessarily bring in an influx of people to the activity. That free soloing has grown in popularity is a difficult thing to measure. It's not as though there are regular Gallup Poles conducted of the climbing community.
The argument is instead that there is this attempt to legitimize free soloing as the "next level" in a rapidly commercialized sport. It's getting to the point where, seemingly, climbers are as strong and as good as they're going to get and the sport needs a new height to reach toward. Things like riskiness or sketchiness have long been a new way to push yourself in climbing beyond what everyone else is doing. So the question is whether or not the sport should include free-soloing on a list of legitimate activities that you are in no threat of losing sponsorship over.
The idea is that when feats of strength are no longer capable of producing interesting, often sponsor-worthy content you can also increase what I call the Probability of Death Factor. Every extreme sport has some version of this. Mountain biking has Red Bull Rampage, downriver kayaking has crazy river runs, backcountry downhill sports...exist, heck even backpacking has some treacherous options. All of these sports create a multiplier in the probability of death and for better or worse make the sport more interesting.
People love to point out when defending free soloing that there is already a probability of death factor in climbing, alpinism, base jumping, and other climbing adjacent sports. This creates a necessary ask; what is an acceptable probability of death factor for any given sport? We can certainly agree that a guaranteed probability of death is a no-brainer, this is literally just suicide and no one is landing sponsorships or cool documentaries for this (I hope).
Free soloing does not have a guaranteed death probability. Marc Leclerc, the featured climber in the movie the Alpinist, died (uh...spoiler alert) not from his solo ascent, but in an avalanche on his rap down, which would have happened had he soloed the whole climb up or not. Other notable soloists have died in rappelling accidents or base jumping accidents. Obviously, Alex Honold and other lesser-known solo climbers are still alive.
So what makes free soloing any more unacceptable than the other dangerous corners of other extreme sports, or even just...climbing? It's actually pretty simple, it's not whether the activity guarantees death since any successfully completed activity would guarantee you live, it's whether failure does. When you fail in many of these extreme sports - you don't land right, you fall, you fall out of your kayak, you trip, you bail etc - there is a chance you will die, but failure does not necessarily mean death. What we're actually measuring is the death probability factor in failure, which in free soloing is as near to100% as one can get.
Imagine if every NASCAR crash meant invariable death or if every loser in an MMA fight was killed on the spot. There are very few legitimate sports in which failure means death almost 100% of the time. To be clear a lot more people might watch a sport as a result of this and it may even promote a widespread interest in the less dangerous pursuits, but this only serves to more rapidly increase the profit motive and subsequent participation (and therefore the death) in the activity. This is why the push to legitimize an activity with a 100% death probability rate in failure is irresponsible.
The larger climbing community and - most importantly - the industry sponsors that prop these athletes up should wholly reject this push and move to immediately delegitimize free soloing. Alex Honnold should not have sponsors, no one who regularly does publicized soloing should. We also need to stop making movies glorifying the practice as some sort of spiritual journey that allows socially awkward narcissists to become beloved ambassadors of the sport.
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