Today the European Indoor Athletics Championships start in Istanbul, and the Spanish team includes ten women (for a total of 29 athletes), a remarkable number that actually no longer surprises us, since we have normalized the presence of Spanish ladies in major events sports.
It was not like this in the past.
Let them tell Carmen Valero (67).
His case is unique, it doesn't stop making me blush.
When one asks about the pioneers of Spanish sport, our first champions, the same names abound: Seve Ballesteros, Manolo Santana, Ángel Nieto, Mariano Haro, Paquito Fernández Ochoa... Nobody mentions Carmen Valero, and that denial hurts the soul because In those seventies, Carmen Valero had come out on the scene to win two titles in two world cross-country championships (in 1976 and 1977, apart from a bronze in 1975).
It will be the time: at that time, the State and the Church stood on end when they saw how the Spanish athletes walked the trails in suspenders and shorts. The federative leaders practiced mobbing:
"You can't do anything: you're big-assed and busty," Carmen Valero recounted what a manager had told her in Wales in 1976, on the eve of her first world gold in cross country.
I want to believe that today it is no longer like that.
(For a year now, Catalan athletics has had a president, who would have said it in the seventies: Mercè Rosich is synonymous with efficiency and knowledge).
True to these other times, we are now supposed to celebrate their successes as much as theirs. But just in case, perhaps as an act of reparation, the Sant Hilari Sacalm City Council and the indefatigable Lluís Saiz organized a tribute to Carmen Valero.
It happened the other Friday: the organizers invited important Catalan athletes, athletes from another time, some even contemporaries of Valero. They didn't fail. Flanking it, sat José Manuel Abascal, Pere Casacuberta, Pere Arco and Josep Maria Antentas, a traveling athletics encyclopedia (Mercè Rosich, the president, also attended).
The act lasted for an hour, and at the end there was a very long applause, so much so that it was Carmen Valero, tearful, who asked us to stop it now.
This time we obeyed her, and there was silence, and historically comforted we went out into the cool night of the Jungle. Driving in silence, back to Barcelona, I was wondering: “What must she think just before reaching the finish line, when she already saw herself as a champion, while she remembered that thing about 'culonas y pechugonas'? Should she go for the leader's jugular, or better keep quiet just in case? And what could she do now?
