In the bowels of Hayward Field, in the heart of American athletics, a figure parades tall and light.
We can make out her from a distance, it's inevitable: she's 1.92m tall, she has short, dyed blonde hair and she shows off a defined and perfect musculature.
Like that of a sculpture.
Or like that of an avatar.
Yulimar Rojas (26) raises her arms and puts on her show. He collides with his open hand, smiles and laughs out loud, gesticulates and walks past the international television stations.
The cameras look at each other, bewildered:
– In English , no.
Does not speak English.
Yulimar Rojas finally stops before the Hispanic journalists, she only speaks Spanish, and spends four minutes in their company.
–Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
And then add:
I keep thinking about the 16 meters. I know I'm close, I know things will continue to flow. I feel that they are in my legs, but you have to fix little things so that everything goes. This has not been my best day.
And yeah, it's gone.
And she takes her third world title (15.47m), triple jumper undefeated since the Rio 2016 Games, with a margin of more than half a meter over her rivals.
(Six of the ten best marks in history belong to her, including her record of 15.67m: she is alone at the summit)
(...)
If we want to find Yulimar Rojas, we have to resort to the short deal.
In short, she dances, a hyperactive creature, she is frank in her gaze and speech, she shares her conflicting feelings.
He talks about a tough childhood in Pozuelos, on the north coast of Venezuela: there are leaks in the house, the roof threatens to collapse.
Yulimar Rojas is a one-year-old baby and the biological father has gone to the United States, disregarding the commitment, and the mother, a modest secretary in the prefecture, has remained in charge of the home.
There are six creatures.
Yulimar is the third.
–We were hungry and hard to buy diapers –he told me years ago, in a conversation in Barcelona.
(Yulimar Rojas had just signed for Barça, whose colors he still defends every time he competes in our country)
He also told me that, if he was an athlete, that was a coincidence:
"I was fourteen years old. I saw myself with a talent for sports. I went to a sports center to try volleyball. The coaches were not. The athletics technicians saw me. They caught me. A week later I was training. At first, in the high jump (he jumped 1.87 m). But it wasn't my thing. It is true that she was tall, but she had more facility for horizontal jumps.
And he was right.
Although not everything was so easy.
Well, what do we know about Venezuelan athletics?
–Robeilys Peinado is world champion in pole vault in lower categories. And Asnoldo Devonish was bronze in triple in Helsinki'52 –Yulimar Rojas told me.
- Of...
Well, there is hardly any history in Venezuelan athletics. And the infrastructure is scarce. And a talent like Yulimar Rojas, a perfect silhouette for jumping, was going to have to use her imagination to grow more.
I am a fanatic of social networks. In 2015, I contacted Iván Pedroso. I wrote to him. I told him that he was the greatest in history, the king of length, and that I would like him to train me. He told me that he followed my evolution, that he saw a lot of talent in me. But that he was still a diamond in the rough.
So, Rojas was a top 10, not the best of the best.
And he got on the plane, destination Guadalajara, and there everything changed.
Pedroso, nine times long-distance world champion, was going to welcome her in Spain: he shaped her, corrected her pathological technical deficiencies and turned her into the perfect jumper, a legend in Latin America, that avatar that, in short, tells me:
I bought an apartment for my mother. She is the best of my life.
