Obstacle Course Racing
Thomas van Tonder is going hand over hand under Africa's highest bridge
He's climbed 90 metres of free-hanging rope above Soweto and won a world title. Now Thomas van Tonder wants to cross more than 600 monkey bars slung beneath the arch of the Bloukrans Bridge.
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The first time Thomas van Tonder stood underneath the Bloukrans Bridge and looked up, he didn't see a record attempt. He saw 216 metres of air between the arch and the river, and a whole lot of steel to cover by hand.
"What have we done?" he remembers thinking.
It's a fair question. If you've ever driven the N2 through the Tsitsikamma, you'll know the bridge. You might even have thrown yourself off it on the end of a bungee cord. Thomas plans to spend a lot longer hanging around up there than that.
This month, he'll attempt to cross more than 600 monkey bars suspended beneath the bridge's arch, going hand over hand up the climb, across the crown and down the far side.
Thomas van Tonder testing the rigging and his limits
© Craig Kolesky / Red Bull Content Pool
Monkey bars. The same thing you'll find on just about every school playground in the country. Scaled up until it becomes an expedition.
And that question he asked himself on day one? It hasn't really gone away. Which, as it turns out, is exactly how he likes it.
Second Was Enough
Rewind to 2013. Thomas lines up for his first ever obstacle course race and finishes second. That's all it took. He's been chasing the next hard thing ever since.
The chase took him a long way, and quickly. Within three years he'd turned pro. He went on to win 17 Warrior Black Ops Elite events, claim national and series titles in 2016 and 2018, and line up at four OCR World Championships. In 2025 he was crowned world champion over 100 metres, stopping the clock at 1:37, and added bronze in the 3k for good measure. Throw in back-to-back Red Bull Rancher Strong wins in 2025 and 2026, and you've got a seriously stacked CV.
It's also, he admits, where the problem started.
The rigging
© Craig Kolesky / Red Bull Content Pool
The Trouble With Ticking Boxes
Win enough races and they stop frightening you. Thomas noticed it first as a kind of comfort. Then it began to feel like something closer to complacency. The difficulty, the not-knowing, the very thing that hooked him on the sport in the first place, had quietly slipped away.
"I wanted that really hard thing again," he says.
He found it in November 2020, in the thick of lockdown, at the Orlando Towers in Soweto. Thomas hung a rope from the top and climbed it. Ninety metres of free-hanging rope with nothing but air beneath his feet. The whole climb took about nine minutes and, somewhere on the way up, he set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 50-metre rope climb: 3 minutes 19.68 seconds.
The build-up took around six months, much of it spent at CityROCK, and the film that came out of it, Rising with the Sun, is on Red Bull TV. But the real takeaway for Thomas wasn't the record. It was the formula.
"We took one element of obstacle racing and blew it up to an unbelievable size," he says.
Take something familiar. Make it huge. See what happens.
Thomas van Tonder at the Bloukrans Bridge
© Craig Kolesky / Red Bull Content Pool
The Hard Way Round
The bridge idea has been rattling around in his head for two or three years. And when it came time to commit, there was an easier option on the table. A straight line of bars across the top of the bridge was well within reach.
Thomas chose the arch instead.
"One version was probably possible," he says. "The other will push me to my limits, and I don't know if I can do it."
Most people would take the first option and call it the smart play. For Thomas, the second was the only one worth doing.
"This is by no means something I know I can do, which means it's the right challenge."
Dad Strength
Something else has shifted since that rope climb. Thomas is now a dad, and it's changed what he wants a big goal to mean.
"The people who look up to you learn far more from what you do than from what you say," he says. "The best way to teach that is to take on something really difficult myself, figure it out and train for it, because the process is where the value is."
Notice what he's not talking about. It isn't the result, the record or the moment he drops off the last bar. It's the months before it. The training. The sore shoulders. The days when the body pushes back and you show up anyway.
Six Metres
There have been plenty of those days.
Obstacle racers pride themselves on being all-rounders, and Thomas has always leaned on that versatility. This project leaves nowhere to hide. Monkey bars demand a very particular blend of grip, pulling power and stamina, and he's had to build it almost from scratch.
"It takes far more strength and endurance than I thought," he says.
He's been training through tendonitis in his elbow and sore shoulders. His first go on a set of incline bars? About six metres.
Six metres. Out of a course of more than 600 bars. That's the gap he's been closing, bar by bar, ever since.
Scared Enough
Ask Thomas how he knows a goal is the right one and he has a simple test.
"If a goal scares you enough that you don't want to miss a training session, it's big enough," he says. "I'm supposed to be a bit scared, and I'm supposed to be hurting."
It's a good rule, and he hasn't had to live by it alone. Max Cluer gave Thomas his first sponsorship, back when he had no big funding and no degree to fall back on, and he's involved in the project today. Richard Lievaart, who heads up rigging and safety, started out as a mate from Thomas's climbing gym.
That's part of the story too. Nobody on this team arrived as a stranger. And when you're about to dangle from the underbelly of a 216-metre bridge, knowing exactly who's checking your ropes counts for a lot.
Weird Is Welcome
Thomas doesn't pretend this is only about him. If people take one thing away from it, he hopes it's this: a dream doesn't have to look normal to be worth chasing.
"It doesn't matter how weird your dream is," he says.
And let's be honest, crossing the underside of Africa's highest bridge by hand is about as weird as dreams get.
Very soon, Thomas will reach up for the first bar and find out how far he can go. Somewhere out over the gorge, that question from day one will probably come back to him.
What have we done?
Whatever the answer, he'll have gone looking for the hard thing and found it. He'll have been properly scared again. Stay tuned for more info on the live stream link for the attempt.
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