And what happened to Julia Vaquero?

My future seemed limitless.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
27 May 2022 Friday 23:17
9 Reads
And what happened to Julia Vaquero?

My future seemed limitless. This is part of the delusion of depression

Ian Thorpe

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This is Julia Cowboy (51). She tells me:

I have already completed a year with my partner. His name is Aquiline. I am rediscovering love. He makes me feel valued.

(...)

And the conversation takes me back to the eighties, to a school cross, the Spanish Championship that was held in Trujillo (Cáceres).

Julia Vaquero, a Galician athlete in a yellow shirt and white pants, powerful and stubborn, flew over the grass, and in her stubbornness she carried everything and took ahead the hundred or so rivals who, helplessly, watched her go in the distance.

- That's where it all started! Julia Vaquero tells me. You don't have any photos of that day, do you? And you don't know of someone who can keep an image?

(I have not found anyone, but on this page I launch the challenge)

Winning that race showed me that I was worth running. Because my childhood and adolescence were hard...

-What happened?

-I'm an only child. I was born in Chamonix (France), but when I was six months old, my parents handed me over to my maternal grandparents in A Guarda: they raised me. My father, Nemesio, worked in construction and my mother, Julia, was a domestic worker. My grandparents were tough, and from another era: I had training deficiencies.

-In what sense?

My father was a gambler. My grandparents took him to the witches, to see if they took away the problem. It didn't work, how was he going to do it? They killed him in a grudge match. I was twelve years old. I had to go identify the body. They made me mourn for a year... My father had spent it all, so I studied on scholarships. My mother told me to go work on the farm, with the cows and picking potatoes. But I had decided that it was worth it to study and to run. Thank God, I came out good girl.

And boy was it worth it.

Eventually, Julia Vaquero was going to win seven Spanish Cross Country Championships. She and she was in ten World Championships of the specialty (she was fourth in Turin, in 1997). And she was an Olympian in Atlanta'96, in the 10,000 m, the same year in which she broke the Spanish record of 5,000 m (14m44s95).

He still holds the record.

Not even Marta Domínguez, famous for her tricks, has managed to overcome it.

And did you make money?

-I guess not as much as Fermín Cacho. But if it had been well managed, it would have been enough for me to live on income. But Germán, my ex-partner and the father of my daughter, Xúlia, took everything. And now look at me...

And I pay attention to his words.

She tells me about that childhood trauma, the murder of her father and the little care she received. About her depressive episodes, her eating disorders and her diagnosis of bipolarity. And of the financial nonsense of her environment, personalized in her ex-partner.

–With my money from athletics, we set up a sportswear store in A Guarda (the town named a street after him). And we bought a house, a mansion I call it. He managed my earnings, he never knew how much I earned. I only know that, in my psychological collapse, he made me sign the division of the properties at the time of the divorce. He kept the store and the mansion and my 18-year-old daughter, whom I barely see. And I have to settle for a pension of 400 euros per month. I have been very sunk and ashamed, it has taken me a long time to dare to go out and tell it, you cannot imagine how many self-help books I have read. And I must tell you that more than once I have thought of taking my own life.

(a documentary tells her story: Julia Vaquero, the longest career, in Movistar Report)

–Luckily, in 2020, Franc Beneyto appeared –he continues.

Beneyto is the creator of the FBR sneaker concept, and has also become Julia Vaquero's trainer.

-Franc has given me back my enthusiasm for running, I had gotten into the world of trails and marathons and duathlons, and that is what I dedicate myself to now, training and living.

And Aquilino?

-Aquilino is my love. He accompanies me by bike when I go out for a run, or with the car when I go by bike. He understands me and listens to me and gives me everything I haven't had.