Slackliner walks across Italy’s Strait of Messina on the world’s longest slackline, fails to set new world record

The video was shared by Roose from his official Instagram account @jaantastic in collaboration with Red Bull. In the video, he narrates, “I’m walking right now on the world’s longest slackline. 3,640 metres from the mainland of Italy all the way to Sicily over the Messina Strait.”

As the video progresses, he completes 1 km on the slackline and says, “That’s a long long journey.” As he covers another kilometre, he continues to narrate his next steps. Occasionally, the video provides an aerial perspective, showing a lone figure walking on a narrow rope high above water and under the open sky.

Taking 15,660 steps, Roose completed the challenging walk in less than three hours, surpassing the current Guinness World Record of 2,710 metres, a report by EuroNews said. At its lowest point, the slackline was 100 metres above the water. In the final stage, Roose climbed 130 metres to reach the endpoint on Sicily’s Torre Faro tower, achieving this in 2 hours and 57 minutes.

 

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Roose braved winds up to 38 km/h and temperatures up to 28 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, just 80 metres from the finish, Roose fell off the slackline. This stumble means that, despite covering a significantly greater distance than the previous world record of 2,710 metres, he did not set a new world record.

On seeing the video, one user commented, “fell 100m before the very end 😢 but mad respect, it’s absolutely INSANE.” Another user said, “That middle shot is insane just endless flapping slackline ahead.” And a third expressed, “walking with such confidence is WILD.” Meanwhile, a fourth user added, “So this is how google maps calculate how long it would take to walk to your destination.”

Jaan Roose is a three-time slackline world champion and the first athlete to perform a double backflip on a slackline.