Every time I go to eat at my parents' house, I take the opportunity to take a nap on the sofa of a lifetime.
That's THE SOFA.
Asleep right there, at 52 years old, with my father and mother by my side, also taking a nap, I revisit the past. If those cushions could talk! They are confidants, keepers of secrets. I have sighed in them, I have dreamed, I have cried for them adolescent heartbreak.
(...)
Thinking of my parents' sofa, I think of David García Zurita.
He is an athlete, he is 17 years old: he is so brilliant that last weekend, even though he was just a kid, he had jumped to represent Spain in the European Indoor Championships in Istanbul.
He ran the 4x400 relay.
Actually, the proposal had been demanding, a brown for a teenager. The injuries to two teammates (Iñaki Cañal and Manuel Guijarro) and tactical circumstances had caused David García Zurita to play the last turn.
Óscar Husillos had started like lightning and had opened a good gap over the rest of the rivals. Then things had gotten complicated. Markel Fernández and Lucas Búa had held the leading position, but had lost part of the advantage. When he received the witness, David García Zurita could see the breath of the lions. The outcome was going to be dramatic. The Belgians overtook him with 150m to go and the French and the Dutch, on the squares. Bewildered and dwarfed, the boy had collapsed as soon as he assimilated the magnitude of the tragedy. And although Óscar Husillos jumped on the dance floor to comfort him, and after him the rest, David García Zurita's mind had left the stage.
I saw him collapse in a corner.
Perhaps he was cursing himself: because of him, perhaps he told himself in his adolescent naivete, he had blown the medal.
I saw how he sat in a corner: his gaze was lost on the horizon, and he remained like that, in a state of shock, while Paloma Monreal, head of communication for Spanish athletics, acted as a temporary mother. She remained standing next to her, she didn't move from there.
The boy was like this for ten minutes, and then it got worse. He crouched down, crawled to a nearby wastebasket and vomited up his lactic acid and his confusion, feeling the weight of the tragedy, perhaps the first great heartbreak of the adolescent in love with athletics.
I wonder what he was thinking down there, curled up in a ball, hugging the wastebasket. Perhaps he was thinking of his parents' sofa, because there is nothing more comfortable, a better parapet, whether you are 52 or 17.
