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Sandra Sánchez, the 'little girl' of karate is already the biggest

2021-08-05T12:17:24.130Z


The talaverana gets the gold medal at the home of the Japanese Shimizu, her biggest rival in the last six years


Like someone who goes to an exam and knows everything and just wants to do it and get rid of that anxiety. This is how Sandra Sánchez jumped on the mat of the Nippon Budokan this Thursday, a magical place, the temple of martial arts. And she did it in a big way, a gold medal against the Japanese Kiyou Shimizu. Although both were equal in technique -19.06-, the Spanish improved the physical score (8.46 or 8.28), so after the two karatecas performed the same kata exercise, it was declared that the Talaverana was the champion with 28.06 for the 27.88 of the Japanese. It was 8:00 p.m. when the judge pointed to her right. Towards Sandra Sánchez, to indicate that it had been gold. At 8:50 p.m., he appeared in the mixed zone, still incredulous. "I have done! I have done! I am an Olympic champion. I don't believe it, I don't believe it, I think I have to see kata again,look at me on the screen and say: oh but that's me ”. Is she, yes, so natural, spontaneous, excited, happy, with a tremendous high on top. If you are told now that you have to run to Sapporo, you run away.

“I was so confident in the work we did that I was calm. And although I knew that I had factors against it, I knew that we were in Japan and they always say that coming out in blue is better [she wore the red belt] I said: well that's it, it doesn't matter, if I do what I have to do, if I let myself the soul on the mat and I give them my heart, they have to value it. And that I have done ”.

When she was a four-year-old girl and claimed to feel something every time she stepped on a tatami, she didn't stop until she convinced her parents to take her to one. The teacher told them: "Let her try, she will pass the nonsense." It never happened. At her home, in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo, 83,000 inhabitants), thousands and thousands of kilometers away from Tokyo, her brother Paquito, two years older than her, set up this Thursday a small Olympic village in which all of the the family, all with Sandra's shirt. "Give him all our support," asked Serafín, his father, through WhatsApp. Sandra had given her parents the plane tickets so they could go to Japan to live and share their excitement from the stands.That was before the pandemic hit and turned the Games into a bunker with volunteers and journalists as the only spectators.

A small thing in the long list of difficulties and obstacles that the karate fighter overcame throughout his career.

And this Thursday, from the tatami that she stepped on with the anxiety of doing it well, as if it were the selectivity,

Sandrita

came out

, as her parents call her, with a gold in the country of the cradle of karate.

The katas (she did the Chatanyara Kushanku) are fights against imaginary rivals in which the judges value technique, strength, balance and the ability to transmit.

The fight for gold has been with the rival of the last five years, the Japanese Kiyou Shimizu, who snatched the world title in Madrid in 2018. It is the first Olympic medal in the history of karate, which had never been included in some Games.

And that he will also be fired, because he has fallen out of the Paris 2024 program.

More information

  • Video report |

    Sandra Sánchez, the karateka who was marginalized for being next to her mother and who has returned to fight for the Olympic gold

  • The magic of Budokan, the sanctuary of karatecas and judokas

  • Marching walkers in the Sapporo sauna

A medal that has arrived on the same day as the fifth anniversary of her marriage to Jesús del Moral, her partner and coach, the person she sought, oblivious to the fact that they would end up sharing life, to become a karate fighter again.

The person who calls her

little

and who, she says, gives her wings.

The person who first put her to the test to see if she really loved karate and kata enough to put her soul into it and then made her cross to the good side the dangerous line where the head is struggling when you feel that few believe in you.

Sánchez's medal is the medal of stubbornness.

If international competitions have been paid for with money from the piggy bank.

Having suffered so much that when his opportunity came, he showed that he was there to eat the tatami in bites and that from that moment on he was going to enjoy himself and take life with a smile.

The sea of ​​contagious, in addition.

Since 2015 he has not gotten off the podium.

The karate fighter is now 39 years old.

He stepped on the mat for the first time with four.

He did not get on an international podium until he was 32, the age at which karate men are normally already retired.

Since then (2015) he has taken 55 medals in a row;

56 with that of this Thursday, the most important;

the one who said it would make her cry, scream, jump and laugh with joy after so many things withheld.

It took her so long to get on a podium because she was out of the way for several years.

At 20, he entered the High Performance Center (CAR) in Madrid and left after a month because his mother was diagnosed with cancer and he wanted to be close to her. I was going to leave the residence, not the training routines. From the Federation back then they told their master that he had wasted his moment. And he had to fight for years to prove that he was not. “I did not receive any

feedback

when I commented that I was leaving the CAR, nobody called me afterwards either. It was as if it disappeared ”, he told this newspaper.

He continued training and competing representing his Talavera club, finished Sports Science and at the age of 24 he left karate and went to Australia. “I saw that I couldn't go any further and I began to think about my professional future. With a scholarship to learn English, I went to Brisbane and stayed for a year. He gave after-school karate classes ”.

On the way back they asked him to do katas again; She didn't feel like going back to that environment that had left her out. But he allowed himself to be convinced and had to fight for a month to convince Del Moral - disenchanted with many competitors who left him overnight - to become his coach. For her he was the only one capable of making her improve by mixing physical and karate. And Del Moral always says that Sandra has something special. "I saw something in her that is very difficult to see in others: there is something that she transmits to you, something out of the ordinary ... It's like when a genius out of a million comes out, she has something, and Sandra has that something." That something is basic. The perfect kata is the one that is done with the heart, it is the one that people who do not know karate see it and get their hair on end ”.

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Source: elparis

All sports articles on 2021-08-05

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