Aniya Holder

Aniya Holder (born 3 August 2001) is a South African rock climber who specializes in competition climbing, particularly speed climbing. As of 2024, Holder is the reigning female African Continental Champion in women's speed climbing, and she will represent South Africa in that discipline at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Early life
Holder was born on 3 August 2001 in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), South Africa. She grew up in Makhanda as one of seven children, and her father was a director of music at Kingswood College. Holder was homeschooled and tried both dancing and karate before picking up climbing at age 14. She began climbing at a small wall at Rhodes University and started joining the university's club on outdoor climbing trips at 16.

Competitive climbing career
Holder participated in her first competitive climbing event at 17 and originally kept to the boulder and lead categories. In 2021, however, she fractured her knuckles by punching a volume hold on the wall. Soon after partially healing from that injury, Holder dislocated her elbow while bouldering, which necessitated five months' rest to rehabilitate. Her coach, Jay-D Muller, suggested that she try speed climbing as a less painful and less injury-prone alternative to boulder and lead. Holder has said doesn’t have such hard, compressed moves – it’s more running up the wall." She began speed climbing in October 2022 and took a liking to it, despite the poor facilities available to her — the international standard route is 15 meters, but the gym in Gqeberha only has a 6-meter wall, which must be changed every 1-3 months to resemble each third of the official route. In late 2023, she entered her first-ever speed climbing competition and won.

Holder won first-place in the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC)'s 2023 African Continental Championship, but initially began training for it without even realizing the event was a qualifier for the 2024 Summer Olympics. At the competition, held in Pretoria in December 2023, she qualified for the speed climbing event's final round with a time of 11.89 seconds, and won the final with a time of 11.33 seconds, over two seconds faster than second-place finisher Tegwen Oates.

Holder will be the only woman representing an African nation in the speed climbing event at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. She will be joined on Team South Africa by fellow speed climber Joshua Bruyns as well as boulder-and-lead combined climbers Lauren Mukheibir and Mel Janse van Rensburg.

Personal life
As of 2024, Holder lives in Gqeberha and works full-time as a route-setter and coach at the local climbing gym. She is also a visual artist. Holder's father Stephen, a former director of music at Kingswood College, died in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Stephen never got to see Aniya compete or climb outdoors, so she painted a portrait of him on her chalk bag in remembrance.