Thomas van Tonder spent 47 minutes and 37 seconds hanging by his hands beneath the Bloukrans Bridge in South Africa, crossing 600 monkey bars that climb a 45-degree incline, follow the concrete arch and drop down the other side, as high as 216 metres above the river.
The crossing happened on Monday, 26 October 2026, in the Tsitsikamma region of South Africa. It was the first time anyone had completed the specially built course under the arch of the bridge.
Van Tonder is an obstacle course racing world champion who grew up in the town of Hartbeespoort. He started the attempt at 10:21 in the morning, local time, under a light breeze and an uncertain sky.
A course of 280 metres where his feet never touched anything
According to Red Bull, which organised the project under the name Red Bull Bridge Bars, the course was about 280 metres long and carried roughly 600 bars. The company describes it as the longest set of monkey bars ever built.
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The Bloukrans Bridge is the highest bridge in Africa, according to the local newspaper Kormorant. At its highest point the athlete was 216 metres above the Bloukrans River, with the forested gorge directly below his shoes.
Looking at the photos, it is hard not to feel your own forearms burn. Unlike a normal obstacle race, there was no running, no rest platform and no change of discipline. The route demanded that he stay suspended from the bars for the whole distance, from the first rung to the last.
The first stretch forced him to climb facing backwards
The bridge opened with its hardest section. At 45 degrees, the first part of the climb is so steep that van Tonder could not face forward. He had to turn his back to the bars, pull himself up and reach behind for the next one.
His heart rate was already at 150 beats per minute, Red Bull reported, and five minutes into the climb his hands were suffering. By 10:34 he was saying it out loud: “Hands are not feeling great.”
He had always expected the climb to be the worst part, but not by this much. “It was easily double that,” he said afterwards. “Nothing can really compare to just the continuous beating that that incline puts on the same muscle group.”
He planned for 35 minutes and reached halfway after 30
Before the attempt, van Tonder estimated the crossing would take between 30 and 35 minutes. After 30 minutes on the bars, he realised he was only approaching the halfway point, Kormorant reported.
At the crown of the arch the bridge flattens out, and that was where he struggled most with his head. “I’d say that was, to me, the mentally toughest part,” he said. “I found it really difficult to get any rhythm.”
Looking ahead only made it worse. “If you look at the finish, it’s so far out of reach and there’s so many bars in between,” he said. “It seems undoable.” So he stopped looking at the finish line entirely.
Upside down, he felt his head throbbing
To keep going, he split the course into small targets and told the rigging chief over the radio which point he was aiming for next. “Not that it made it easier,” he said, “but more mentally consumable.”
Deep into the middle section, his body began to send warnings. “There were definite moments where I was upside down, when my head started kind of throbbing and I knew I had to turn myself back around,” he said.
The problem was getting back up without trusting his grip. “I had to get back up, but I’m not sure if my hands would actually carry me,” he told Red Bull. “Just trusting myself that they would, and they did.”
On the way down, gravity pulled the other way
The descent mirrors the climb, starting level and steepening to 45 degrees at the finish. Now gravity pulled him forward, and the challenge became slowing down and catching every bar cleanly without letting the speed tear his hands off.
He only started to believe he would finish in the last 40 metres or so, roughly the final quarter. “The rest of it was a fight,” he said. In the last 20 metres, one sentence ran on a loop in his head.
“The voice in my head was just, like, make sure, make sure, make sure every single bar,” he said. “I was so afraid that I would have a slip of hand, or a glitch, and I’d miss a bar.”
Six months of training on a rig built at home
The first time van Tonder tried incline bars at home, he managed about six metres. To prepare, he built a training rig at his Hartbeespoort home with almost 50 metres of uphill monkey bars, according to Kormorant.
He trained on it for six months, working through elbow tendonitis, shoulder problems and other muscle injuries. The idea of crossing the bridge had been with him for about two years before the attempt.
He also had help from climbing legend Stefan Glowacz during preparation. Even so, he went into the day without any certainty. “This is by no means something I know I can do,” he said, “which means it’s the right challenge.”
Engineers could not drill a single hole in the bridge
The course itself was an engineering problem. Richard Lievaart, head of rigging and safety at Vertical Safety Systems, led the team that designed and installed the bars, and nothing could be bolted or drilled into the bridge.
The team built a system with no permanent fixing and two independent safety points for the athlete. Some of them rigged through the night before the attempt and then stayed up on the structure during the crossing.
Van Tonder credits them first. “It pushed us all outside of what we were comfortable and capable of,” he said. “And I’d like to put to the world that that, to me, is where the real value in all this lies.”
The tape on his fingers was worn through
By the final stretch, the protective tape on his fingers had been ripped right through. His palms, which he expected to tear open, held up better than he feared. “At least I can close them again now,” he said. “Yeah, they hurt.”
This was not his first extreme test of grip. In 2020, he earned a Guinness World Record for climbing 90 metres of free-hanging rope at the Soweto Towers in Johannesburg, according to Kormorant and Red Bull.
A father who wants to inspire his children
Becoming a father was a big part of why he took the challenge on, he said. “The people who look up to you learn far more from what you do than from what you say.”
At the finish, with his family waiting, he summed it up simply. “I just completed one of my biggest dreams and missions for the last two years,” he said. “We actually made it to the other side.”
He also left a warning for anyone tempted to copy him. “If you’re gonna take on something like this, you’ve gotta come in humble,” he said. A full replay is due on Red Bull TV from 28 October.
Could you hang on for 600 bars and almost 48 minutes, or would your hands give up before the top of the arch?
