Moments: A Clean Divide

It was November 2001 and Tommy Caldwell’s life was finally getting back on track. It’s never been easy to make a living as a professional climber, and it certainly wasn’t back then, before social media gave athletes a voice, and Caldwell, who was more focused on sport climbing and bouldering than adventure, was struggling to break through. He’d also just survived a harrowing ordeal in Kyrgyzstan, when he, girlfriend Beth Rodden, and two other climbers were kidnapped by Islamic militants. They finally escaped when they were left with a single armed guard and Caldwell pushed the man off a cliff, allowing them to flee.

Tommy was haunted by the thought he’d killed someone, even to save his own life, and he was wracked by guilt and nightmares. “For the first year after that,” his father Mike told the New York Times, “Tommy was almost nonverbal, he was so shaken by it.” Eventually, they got word that their captor had survived and was