Sky Tower Stair Climb Record Smashed

The record for the fastest Sky Tower run has been broken! Twenty-five year old Thomas Dold from Germany yesterday ran from street level (level 4) up to level 53 of Auckland’s iconic Sky Tower is an impressive four minutes and 53 seconds beating the old record by an outstanding 24 seconds. The previous record was five minutes 17 seconds.

Thomas is a German track and field and extreme athlete and a tower runner, stair runner, world record holding champion backwards runner and a member of the German national mountain running team.

Thomas has competed a number of times in the most prestigious tower run in the world, the Empire State Building Run Up in New York. He first participated in 2005 and finished second. The next year he won the competition, and became the youngest to ever do so. In 2007 he won it for a second time with a personal best of 10 minutes eight seconds and returned in 2008 and again won breaking his record with 10 minutes six seconds.

Thomas is in New Zealand with German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as part of Tourism New Zealand’s international media programme. His record-breaking run, as well as his other activities in New Zealand, will be covered in the print and online editions of this paper reaching around 500,000 German readers.