The winner's speech

It happened a few years ago.

The Goya awards gala ended and many of the nominated actresses and actors touched their pockets where they kept the sheet of paper in which they had written the speech they had prepared in case they won the award.

The night took several of them to Toni 2, a venue in Madrid where people end up surrounding the piano as if it were a corpse.

There, Eduard Fernández dropped onto the singer's bench and, instead of interpreting a song, he excitedly read the speech that he had prepared in the event that he had been the winner.

Those who were there say that they got goosebumps.

Carlos Bardem and Juan Diego Botto joined him later.

To his family, to his friends, to the people I always trust in them.

A dedication reserved for another stage ended up being read to a few people in that piano bar:

If millions of people find out about our successes, before the two or three people who really interest us, it is worth nothing.

My friend Gerardo Lorenzo said it back in the day.

get you out in

before

: if your mother and her friends don't read it, everything will have been in vain.

Speeches must always be read, even if they are not written.

On Friday was the delivery of the Cirilo Rodríguez awards in Segovia, the prestigious award that recognizes a foreign correspondent or special envoy.

It has been won by journalists such as Mónica Bernabé, Soledad Gallego-Díaz, Enric González or Mónica García Prieto.

Three references were nominated this year: Griselda Pastor, Plàcid García-Planas and Jacobo García, recently arrived from the coverage of the war in Ukraine.

Jacobo García is a journalist for EL PAÍS in America, and a friend of mine.

Before an audience of 200 people, in which his parents were present, my friend had gone to the awards ceremony as one should go to these things: believing that he was going to lose and with nothing prepared.

The fact is that, while giving the result, Jacobo heard that he was the first finalist, and who knows what connection of bare wires, he thought he had won.

So he came on stage and said, “I had prepared the loser's speech, not the winner's.

But I'll improvise."

Wow, he improvised.

Fifteen minutes of thanks in which he remembered the murdered and exiled journalists, in addition to dedicating the award to the writing of this newspaper in America.

They were moving words that traced the difficult and tortuous map of doing journalism in countries like Mexico and El Salvador.

With a great phrase that he addressed to the other two finalists: "This award is also yours, colleagues."

He came down from the stage happy and victorious to return to his seat.

Ramón Lobo approached him and said softly: “You are the first finalist,

not the winner”, and my friend replied with a smile thinking that it was a joke: in the place I had gone down to, there was no longer room for the truth.

If he got out of there dead, they'd all get out.

When it was announced on stage that Plàcid García-Planas had won, he began to shrink until he evaporated as he apologized to the right and left.

He had taken losing so much for granted that he didn't even prepare a speech;

the fact that he had lost believing himself to be the winner, improvising a victory monologue, was pure hell.

He told me this Saturday crying with laughter and shame, as great stories are told.

Two days later he showed me the video.

I love him very much and I admire him even more, because he is everything a reporter dreams of being, but in those minutes in which he gives his speech, in the opposite direction of the world, they directly want to adopt him.

I tried to comfort him.

What are we but our winners' speeches?

What are we but what we were going to be five minutes before what we were not?

There are still two weeks to go until the Champions League final: why aren't we going to win it now, if we don't know what will happen later?

I didn't convince him.

And less bad.

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber