For Darius Râpa, it was love at first climb. First, on the gas pipes behind the building where he grew up and then in the climbing gym, where he followed his older brother. "Since then, I haven't stopped climbing," recalls Darius, who was only five years old at the time.
The first time Darius realised that he wanted to turn climbing from a fun game into a career was during one of his competitions outside of Romania. "We were winning international competitions from the age of eight," he recalls. So, at the age of 14, he started participating in official International Sports Climbing Federation events and the results began to accumulate quickly, bringing with them a number of firsts for Romanian climbing.
