“Freddy Rincón was a superior talent, good for any time”

It was the nineties and Arrigo Sacchi's Milan ruled European football.

On the other side of the world, Pacho Maturana carried out his own Caribbean revolution.

The maximum expression of that artistic movement that transferred the rhythm of vallenato to a soccer field was a slow player, with a prodigious stride, a buoy on which the rivals impacted before shooting off in any direction.

Freddy Rincón, who died this Wednesday at the age of 55 due to the consequences of a traffic accident in Cali, was screwed in the center, in the territories of five, and from there he dominated the entire world.

The rivals passed by unprepared, ready for him to steal the ball, and his teammates to give it to him and start the attack with a caress.

Rincón never took one more race in vain.

Jorge Valdano was in the stands the afternoon he scored the goal in the draw against Germany in the United States, in 1994. He celebrated it like any other fan because it seemed fair to him, Colombia had played better.

Valdano was about to start his second season as coach of Real Madrid and was looking for a replacement for Luis Enrique, who was known to go to Barcelona.

Rincón was his man, although that didn't work out.

“I was always frustrated that Real Madrid didn't enjoy his talent.

He was a victim of the institutional moment of division [the fall of President Ramón Mendoza] that ended me and ended him,” he says by phone.

His teammates were amazed at him in training.

“He was a player of superior talent and the most imposing physique I have ever seen.

That's why he was good at that time, but he would have been good at this time as well,” Valdano continues.

That year, 1995, a young man named Álvaro Benito joined the first team, called to continue the path of the Butragueño and company.

A knee injury kept him from elite football, but that year he was able to see Rincón up close: “He was a beast, he had extraordinary physical and technical potential.

That was not transferred to the competition, it was strange.

Adapting to Real Madrid is not easy”, recalls Benito.

He ended up the following year in Brazil, where he had already played at the beginning of his career.

The leisurely pace of South American football suited him perfectly.

Rincón, although he had a salsa plant, preferred valls.

He became the captain of Corinthians, where he shared the central strip with Vampeta, a tractor.

They won the local tournament with Vanderlei Luxemburg and the following year, with Oswaldo de Oliveira, they repeated the title and added the Intercontinental Cup.

Rincón lifted the title.

“He was a leader, a total player.

With the ball and without the ball”, recalls Marcos Senna, who had just signed for the Sao Paulo team that year.

Senna was an eight, a dribbling midfielder who liked to make the last pass.

De Oliveira, however, put him next to Rincón the day Vampeta was missing.

That day, Senna was running from one place to another, suffering from the rookie syndrome.

Rincón grabbed him by the shoulders and told him: "Boy, be still."

"He taught me that in soccer it is more to think than to run," he recalls on the other end of the phone.

He never moved from that position and would later become European champion with Luis Aragonés' Spain.

Rincón did not succeed in the Spanish league, but he gave Senna vital advice so that he could.

Years later he was included in the Corinthians Hall of Fame.

Freddy Rincon lifts the FIFA Cup as a Corinthians player after receiving the trophy from Joseph Blatter in 1996. Matthew Ashton - EMPICS (PA Images via Getty Images)

Like Valdano, Víctor Toro Medina, a player from the Colombian Guajira who played in Millonarios, is convinced that Rincón would be a dominant player today.

He “he has been the most complete player in the history of our football.

He was ahead of his time!

He went back and forth from his area to the opposite in the eighties, when that did not exist.

He was a

midfielder ”, he highlights.

When his legs didn't give him much, he set up a booth in the center of the field and from there he regulated traffic.

As a good Latin American idol, he also had something of an antihero.

In that he resembles the icon of vallenato music Diomedes Díaz or Maradona.

Brazil arrested him in 2006 for having allegedly acted as a figurehead in Panama for a drug trafficker he knew from childhood.

Cali is the world capital of salsa and dance, more than San Juan or New York, but also the closest city to hectares and hectares of coca cultivation.

Some of the best-known drug traffickers are from there, such as Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela.

The drug trafficking culture, as drug trafficking is called, permeated all layers of society, including sports.

Interpol issued a search and arrest warrant in 2015 against him for the same accusation, although a judge in Panama closed the case months later due to lack of evidence.

If in the clubs he had sometimes faltered, with the yellow shirt of Colombia he always fulfilled.

"He was transformed when he put it on," says Adolfo 'Tren' Valencia, moved by the loss of a dear friend.

In recent years, they had often seen each other at the estate of another striker, Faustino Asprilla.

There they organized matches between retired soccer players from Cali and Medellín, the two cities that have historically contributed the most players to the national team.

René Higuita, Tréllez, Aristizabal, Iguarán got together.

At the end, they prepared a barbecue and had a few drinks while they remembered their careers as unconventional players.

Compared to the rigid Matthäus or Klismann, they were beings from another planet.

Most of them left the farm at the end of the afternoon, except for the host, Asprilla, Valencia and Rincón: “We woke up.

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