Fear Fighter

Aries Susanti Rahayu never submitted to her fear of heights. Instead, she took it on as a challenge and has become an outstanding young female competitive climber.

- Ester Christine Natalia

The spotlight was on Aries Susanti Rahayu, 24, when she won the gold medal for Indonesia in the 2018 Asian Games. It was the very first time for sport climbing to be competed in the games and she recorded a time of 7.61 seconds, earning a gold medal in the speed climbing category, beat ing her Indonesian counterpart Puji Lestari. Her achievements have not stopped there. In October last year, Aries brought home a gold medal from the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) World Cup in Wujiang, China. She recorded 7.74 seconds in speed climbing and beat French athlete Anouck Jaubert, the world’s number-one female speed climber in 2018. Aries was ranked fourth in the world ranking by the IFSC in 2018.

Those achievements would never have been realized if Aries had insisted on quitting as a climber. In 2016, she intended to pack sport climbing in for reasons she now describes as “childish”. “I was emotionally unstable at that time. I got tired and upset because I wasn’t assigned to a certain speed climbing category that I had targeted, so I wanted to stop climbing,” she says with laugh.