While some names from the most recent swimming are losing presence (Katie Ledecky and David Popovici have not appeared in Doha; Adam Peaty, king of the breaststroke in recent times, is suffering his share to make his way to the finals), the wise men of the Spanish swimming is also very successful.
Mireia Belmonte and Jessica Vall, the latest references in our specialty, are not there, so all their expectations are focused on Hugo González.
Hugo González is 24 years old and has three European podiums, but until now he has never seen himself where he is now: six months before the Paris Games, he has just reached a world podium.
He did it this Tuesday, in the 100 m backstroke, in an exercise that was as dizzying as it was exciting: he started with everything, he covered the first length in 25 seconds, faster than his seven opponents, and he only gave way in the last ten meters, when he lost the gold by a sigh, just two hundredths: he scored 52.70, compared to the 52.68 of the American Hunter Armstrong, hypothetical favorite, who shouted:
-It has been very hard!
Hugo González looked scared, or stupefied, because he is finally seeing himself where everyone thinks he should be.
Prodigious swimmer in 2017, at the time when Mireia Belmonte monopolized everything in our country, Hugo González had won four medals in the Junior World Championships that year (three gold and one silver), before projecting himself onto the medal table. European in 2021, and before getting confused afterwards.
Things had gone badly for him at the Tokyo 2020 Games (they had been held in 2021, months after Hugo González's applauded European Championship), and from then on he had entered a loop of doubts, as he no longer saw the light in the swimming, but rather financial uncertainty and lack of support.
–I hope it is not my last race in the Games, because I don't know what help I will have from now on –he had said in Tokyo, after being eliminated from the final of the 200 styles.
–And what led you to continue? –La Razón asked him in a recent interview.
–Half, if not more than half, of my dream was to swim fast in the NCAA (the US championships; Hugo González divides his time between California and Madrid), because I know that my team had invested a lot in me, emotionally. , financially with the full scholarship, it was a big effort. I wanted to go back to the NCAA and show them that I could swim faster.
He was rescued by perseverance and, in the end, the appearance of aid. Speedo arrived, his ADO scholarship was renewed, Madrid's Canoe also offered him income, and Hugo González, a graduate in languages from Berkeley (California), a Computer Science student at UCAM in Murcia, found the argument that would lead him to persevere in the swimming.
The technicians are grateful (Dave Durden in California; Taja González in Madrid) and the Spanish specialists are grateful, since pool swimming, now the most fragile specialty of the Spanish chain (absent from a world podium since 2017), will not be left blank in Doha.
(Spain already has seven podiums: four in artistic swimming, one on the springboard, another in open water and, now, the silver of swimmer Hugo González).
