"Fado is made for you, Roberto," Ramón Cid would tell him, and Robert Zotko would nod. Zotko was melancholic and sentimental, and sometimes cheerful, and he lived in Lisbon and was passionate about Portugal and the triple jump, but he was not Portuguese, but Russian, and once, on one of the visits he made to his friend in San Sebastián, the city where he wanted to be born, told him something else. “When the Moscow Games I went to hell, Ramón. I have been to hell, and, I tell you, it is very difficult to get out of there.
By 1980 Zotko had betrayed what he loved the most, and he was mortifying himself for it. He had betrayed himself. He lived his life as an atonement.
The triple jump is an art, poetry, rhythm, said Zotko, an esthete, nomad on a mission. And the story of the triple jump, which the Irish invented, the Japanese fertilized, the Americans despised, the Poles and Soviets turned into science and the Brazilians into music, did not contradict it.
Adhemar Ferreira da Silva, the son of a railroad worker and washerwoman in the suburbs of São Paulo, became an athlete because the first time he heard it he fell in love with the sound of the word athlete and, although he did not know what it was, he wanted to be one, and He did triple jumper because it was the most harmonious specialty, the one that allowed him to have a slender, classic body, the body that he maintained until his death. He died in January 2001, two months after Zátopek, and had been his friend since the two were crowned at the Helsinki 52 Games, the Czech as a triple gold medalist (5,000 meters, 10,000 and marathon, something unique) and the Brazilian as triple champion and world record holder (16.22 meters), and, between endless series of hopscotches and multi-jumps, he smoked a pack a day. In Melbourne 56, he won a second Olympic gold, acrobatic as a dancer whom grace never leaves, and later he was also an actor and played the role of death in Marcel Camus' film Black Orpheus, in which carnival vibrated.
The triple and art were again condensed in Brazil two decades later in the slender, soaring, elastic, fast, agile and flexible body of João Carlos de Oliveira, perfection, and when he jumped, his big eyes wide open, admired perhaps From what her body was capable of, her tongue slipped between her teeth, and grooved, and there was no muscle in her body that wasn't fully functioning. The beauty. The charisma of someone who lights up life when he appears, a jumper who in 1975, at the age of 21, jumps 17.89 meters, and breaks Saneyev's world record by 45 centimeters, the largest bite in history. That day João Carlos de Oliveira disappeared and João do Pulo (João del Salto) was born, the name by which he would be known forever and ever. The record lasted 10 years, until Willie Banks beat it by three inches. In the last 40 years, only 11 triplers have managed to fly further.
In Montreal 76, Oliveira jumped injured (and also insisted on playing both triple and length) and was bronze (16.90) in the competition in which Víktor Saneyev won his third consecutive gold. Cid saw Oliveira shortly after, and spoke to him for the first time. “I liked him very much, a menino da rua who had been a car wash, a raptor from Pindamonhangaba, a city in the State of São Paulo, very humble, very pleasant and expressive,” recalls the tripler from San Sebastian. "And years later, in Moscow, he scold me for smoking in the stadium, but he threw it at me calmly, without getting excited."
From Moscow, from the 1980 Games, Cid left pissed off because he stayed one place from going to the final, and Oliveira crying on the bus that returned him from the Lenin stadium to the Olympic Village, with a bronze medal around his neck and his coach, Pedro Henrique Toledo, Pedrão, offering him his shoulder. It was July 25, 1980, it was already dark.
Six days earlier, at four o'clock in the Moscow afternoon, the imposing and ironic fanfare of Shostakovich's festive Overture announced the beginning of the ceremony for the organization of some Games held, without a trace of humor, under the slogan “Oh, sport! , you are peace ”. After the parade and the speeches, Víktor Saneyev, a white T-shirt with rainbow stripes on the chest, stepped on the tartan court of the Lenin Stadium under the stern gaze, protected by his imposing visor eyebrows, by Leonid Breznev and his steel gray suit, accompanied in the presidential box by the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, by the outgoing president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Lord Killanin, and by the head of protocol of the Games and president of the elected IOC, Juan Antonio Samaranch. Neither the flag nor the United States team paraded, nor those of 30 other countries, which, at the initiative of Jimmy Carter, the president of the great Western power, had decided to boycott the Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was the great occasion, in the twilight of his life, to demonstrate the superiority of the Soviet system and Saneyev, triple Olympic triple jump champion, was its symbol, and that is why he was the athlete chosen to enter the stadium with the Olympic torch. Everything was ready for Saneyev to come out of the Games with his fourth gold medal, equaling the record held by the North American disco player Al Oerter, Olympic champion in Melbourne 56, Rome 60, Tokyo 64 and Mexico 68.
"In Moscow neither children nor dogs were seen", remembers poetically, Cid. Only soldiers and KGB agents were seen in Moscow, the chroniclers of the time recall.
"They have stolen my gold, they have stolen my gold," Oliveira complained on the bus after the triple final, and Pedrão agreed with him. "I have never seen him cry in my life," Pedrão later declared. Ramón Cid on the bus watched and lamented. “As I did not qualify for the final, I watched the competition from the stands, and I saw Oliveira's gigantic leap very clearly. He jumped 18 meters or 17.90 at least, a world record, and it was valid for sure, but the judge of the intermediate step, after doubting a bit and verifying that it was very long, raised the red flag to give it a void. And he immediately ordered to erase the marks from the sand so that he could not claim. João raised outstretched arms to heaven and looked incredulous, as if crying out for a justice that did not come. Nobody listened to him. And they did the same to Ian Campbell, an Australian, who was given a null attempt of 17.50. There were no scraping of the free foot, the left, in the second impulse of the jump, the step, of which there can be no proof because they are of appreciation, and in 1990 the IAAF deleted them from its regulations. They are void that were sung by noise, indemonstrable, a wonderful possibility of bitching someone ”.
The marks of the false nulls would have given Oliveira the gold, who was given only two of the six attempts in the final as valid, and was left in bronze with 17.22 meters, and the silver to Campbell, who only they gave as good one of six, which was fifth with 16.72 meters. The gold, however, was not for the designated athlete, Saneyev, who was touched, and could only reach 17.24 meters, and in his sixth attempt, but for his compatriot Jaak Uudmäe, Estonian, who surprised everyone with a 17.35 meter jump. It was a Soviet victory and a defeat for the system.
It didn't take long for Uudmäe to return to the anonymity of a career in which his only successes had been a pair of medals at European championships. "Everything was ready for Saneyev to win, but he jumped injured and couldn't beat me," Uudmäe later explained in an interview. "Even during the Games they were making a film recounting Saneyev's life and victories, from his birth in the Abkhaz capital of Georgia, Sukhumi."
Víktor Saneyev would never reach the four golds of Al Oerter, nor would he star in a heroic film.
Harry Seinberg, the Uudmäe coach, only had the opportunity to speak with João do Pulo in 1992, when the world was different, when the Brazilian champion was preparing to participate in the Paralympic Games in Barcelona. "It was all a fraud, they robbed you with false nulls," Seinberg apologized to Oliveira, and also spoke with a journalist from the Jornal do Brasil. “Only with the fall of the Iron Curtain can we tell the truth: João had reached 18 meters. At the time I thought of reporting it to the IOC, but I backed off. Now I am relieved, at least I can apologize on behalf of myself, Uudmäe and the Estonian people ”. "I already knew it," replied Oliveira. “I already knew that I had won the test and probably reached a new world record. I did not believe that I would have done it null and void and for that injustice I cried for the first time in my life.
A year and a half after Moscow, at Christmas 1981, life continued to give him reasons to cry. And to Pedrão, to make a decision that he would never have wanted to make.
"Pedrão, there is no other, either the leg or life," the doctor told me at the hospital, "explained the coach years later, who also knew it was a false dilemma. Leg or life ?; no, it was the leg and it was life. When his right leg was amputated, João do Pulo would die, even if João Carlos de Oliveira continued to breathe and his heart beat. “His world collapsed, and ours. All that made him João do Pulo was his leg. It was the end for him, wasn't it? ”Said his sister Ana María, for whom the world also sank on the night of December 21, 1981. João was driving his Passat on a São Paulo highway when a drunken motorist was chased by the police collided head-on. Oliveira went into a coma at the hospital. The report indicated a cranial fracture, two open fractures in the right leg, a shattered pelvis and a fractured jaw. His leg was gangrenous and amputated above the knee. He was 27 years old. He died 18 years later, drunk and alone.
The reports that speak of Sukhumi in 2020 describe a ghost city, ruin upon ruin, capital of a ghost republic, Abkhazia, an autonomous territory on the Black Sea coast, not far from Sochi, belonging to Georgia. Archeology of war, which in 1989, when he visited it, seemed to Ramón Cid as beautiful as the valleys and forests of the Basque Country. "At that time it was the center of Soviet athletics, which organized three-month rallies with the best athletes and the best coaches, only the elite," says the Spanish coach, then national head of jumps. “Saneyev was born in Sukhumi and I met him there, on a trip with several other Spanish technicians. The Russians wanted to train in Spain with a view to Barcelona 92 and in return they allowed us to see their technicians and their preparation systems. And there I also met Robert Zotko, who was the national jumping coach. Saneyev, who was honored at an athletic festival, a national hero 10 years earlier, shy and red, asked us for a job. Zotko, who had learned Spanish in Cuba, simply told us: "I have liked you," and gave himself to us. He ordered the great technicians, Vitaly Petrov and company, to put themselves at our disposal as long as we needed. We interrogated them and Zotko acted as interpreter. At night he drank two vodkas and, melancholy, recited Russian poetry to us that he translated into Spanish ”.
Glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev, then Yeltsin, armed conflicts and dismemberment came to the USSR . Saneyev, laden with medals - the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Olympic golds, the Order of Friendship among Peoples - but without a ruble, he emigrated to Australia with his wife and 15-year-old son. In Melbourne he delivered pizzas, went hungry and was about to sell his medals. He finally found a job as a gym teacher. He lives in a house with a garden where lush lemon trees and pomegranates grow, thanks to his green hand and his knowledge as an agricultural engineer from the University of Tbilisi.
Yeltsin was not one of those who believed that sporting successes reflected the power of a country and thousands of technicians lost their jobs as state officials. Zotko faced the diaspora like a pilgrim with a backpack loaded with the seed of the triple jump. "We thought we would invite him to Spain, but Italy came forward, taking him to Formia," says Cid. “We visited him a couple of times. One day he took us to Pompeii, and he was the cicerone. If he even showed us during the World Cup, wandering around, corners of Seville that we didn't even know… And the Portuguese appeared in one of those, and José Barros took him to Lisbon ”.
In Lisbon, where he arrived in 2000 as head of jumps in the technical direction headed by Barros, Zotko laid the foundations for the technical revolution in Portuguese athletics. She taught coaches and athletes. She gave courses and seminars. She sowed everything she knew. In her room in Lisbon some nights she cooked a red beet soup, "the communist soup," they called it, and then they had a drink and talked. “It was an important moment. It was almost sacred when I invited you to the room to share soup, and to talk and drink ”, recalls Barros. The conversations sometimes turned into friendly interrogations in which Barros tried, with prudence and tact, to delve into the life of the Russian who fascinated him so much. “Athletics”, he explained to Barros, “is movement, training has to be first of all a school of movement, and the triple has to be poetry, magic. Music. It has to be clean, clean. I don't judge jumpers by brand, but by aesthetics, by the movement of their feet, their footsteps. Only aesthetics matter. And I betrayed everything at the Moscow Games. I went to hell, and I did not return ”.
“Those explosions,” Barros recalls, “occurred a maximum of two, three times. I did not add more. It was something toxic that was killing him. He was not an alcoholic. He drank a lot, but knew when to stop. I needed to forget. Without saying the reason. He knew that I knew. I took his body to Moscow when he died and his son recognized it to me: 'You have been one of the most important people in my father's life.' It has been one of the hardest moments of my life ”. Zotko died on February 12, 2004, at the age of 67.
Barros called Cid to tell him, and Cid immediately missed the calls at any time of the morning that he always knew were from an excited and impatient Zotko to tell him something and that he pretended to bother him. He also remembered, above all, one night having dinner in Madrid with Zotko. “When we were already having coffee, Roberto took an old photo out of the bag, already wrinkled, and showed it to us. It was him 20 years younger, in the light shirt of an athletic referee, sitting in a chair next to a track and raising a red flag to cancel a jump during the Moscow Games. Next to her, an empty chair, and she began to explain to us why she always wore a veil of sorrow, a fado that was not melancholy but regret. 'I was the one who gave up Oliveira in the final of the Games. I stopped him from winning. In the Soviet Union, triple could only be won by a Soviet, and preferably Saneyev '. And I think he carried the photo in his wallet like someone wearing a hair shirt, to mortify himself, to constantly say to himself, 'I'm a bastard'. And it leaves me lost to see the executioner suffering. I see him as a victim and an executioner. Zotko's father was a Ukrainian professor, and he had suffered Stalin's deportations, which is why, deep down, he held a grudge against a system that despised culture and the people who propagated it. And yet he made his entire career protected by the system. He was a convinced obliged. The thief was a wonderful person ”.
Just four days after Zotko's death, Nelson Évora, a Portuguese boy who has not yet turned 20, competes in Moscow. Jump 16.85 meters. Get the Olympic minimum for the Athens Games. His coach, João Ganço, asks the competition announcer to announce over the loudspeakers of the pavilion that they dedicate this result to Robert Zotko, teacher and friend.
“I am not very special. I am a hard worker, I know my worth, I have my way of jumping, my magic, but I am not a super talent. I don't have very special qualities. I am not, and yet, back in 2002, at the age of 17, Zotko told me that after analyzing all the young Europeans he had only seen two hopes of being something great, and that I was one of them, "he says. Évora, who still has trouble understanding what Zotko saw in him, a Cape Verdean raptor born in Ivory Coast, the son of a foreman who emigrated to Portugal when he was six years old and only knew how to speak French. “I didn't understand why he said it, but it suited me very well. He forced me to work to show him that he was not wrong. I fought a lot. I loved him very much. I liked the way he spoke to me, and when he told me that I was good because I understood what he wanted to tell me right away, I assimilated it and put it into practice. And I often thought that I did not understand what he was saying ”. In 2007, Évora was proclaimed triple world champion in Osaka, and the following year, Olympic champion in Beijing. The Russian who deprived a Brazilian of an Olympic gold had laid the foundations for a Portuguese to achieve it 28 years later. "Every action in life has a price to pay," Zotko said to Barros, and who knows if the gold of Évora, the glory of the raptor of Odivelas, would have seemed like a payment for the debt he contracted in Moscow. His redemption. The end point of your searches. "But it is not the end point of everything," Cid clarifies. "This will only come when the IOC returns to Oliveira the gold that was stolen from him."