The time has come to say goodbye.
Sandra Sánchez, the little karate girl, the one who says she fell into a pot of infinite energy, the one who dreams of being eaten by a giant tortoise before important competitions, the tireless, stubborn, smiling athlete with a contagious laugh, He says goodbye to the tatami at the age of 40 years and eleven months, with medal number 60. The last one, that of the last dance, was achieved this morning in Birmingham (Alabama) at the World Games after defeating the Japanese Hikaru Ono in the final.
In her record, an Olympic gold, two world and seven European.
And, what is more important, having managed to make people know what a kata is, for boys and girls to imitate it in schoolyards.
The kata is a combat against an imaginary rival in which the judges evaluate your ability to transmit, the force,
balance, speed
What you feel and what you get out.
“He says that it's over, but then he looks at me and blurts out: 'Jesus, what if we go to the next competition?'
Jesús is Jesús del Moral, his partner and his coach.
There was always a “next” competition for Sandra Sánchez, even after Olympic gold, when no one had the strength for anything.
She stopped for a week and began to prepare for the World Cup in Dubai, and she hung a gold.
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Sandra Sánchez, the karate fighter who was marginalized for being next to her mother and who has returned to fight for Olympic gold
This time was the last time for real.
Also because karate has been dropped from the program of the 2024 Paris Games. Sandra wanted to say goodbye in a competition with the public.
She didn't have him in Tokyo, that August 5, the day she celebrated her marriage anniversary.
The day she wished her parents were there.
Before the pandemic, she had bought them some gift tickets, so that they would not miss the Olympic event.
The pandemic disrupted everyone's plans.
And her parents, Serafín and María Isabel, organized a huge party in Talavera de la Reina and watched it on TV.
"Give her a hug from us, you who are there and congratulate her on the anniversary," they wrote to this journalist on WhatsApp.
"I've talked to them and they didn't even know what to tell me about how excited they were, the one they've messed up at home...", she later recounted.
She is now a woman about to turn 41.
When she looks back she always sees that four-year-old girl who said she felt something every time she stepped on a tatami and that she didn't stop until she convinced her parents to take her to one.
The teacher told them: "Let her try and she'll get over the nonsense."
She never got over it.
Not even when they stopped believing in her and left her out of her selection.
Not even when she paid for the competitions out of her pocket, breaking the piggy bank she had at home.
Sandra did not get on an international podium until she was 32, the age at which karate fighters are normally retired.
Since then (2015) she has 60 medals in a row.
She took so long to get on a podium because she was away from her for several years.
At 20, she entered the High Performance Center (CAR) in Madrid and a month later she left because her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she wanted to be close to her.
She was leaving the residence, not the training routines.
From the Federation at that time they told her teacher that she had wasted her moment.
And she had to fight for years to prove that she wasn't like that.
He continued training and competing to represent his Talavera club, finished Sports Sciences 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.
He gave extracurricular karate classes.”
On the way back they asked him to do kata again;
but she didn't want to go back to that environment that he had left her out of it.
She let herself be convinced and had to fight for a month to convince Del Moral - disenchanted with many competitors who left him overnight - to become his trainer.
For her, he was the only one capable of making her improve by mixing physique and karate.
And he, when he talks about her, always says: "There is something in her that is very difficult to see in others: there is something that transmits you, something out of series... It's like when a genius out of a million comes out, she has something, and Sandra has that something.”
That something is basic because the perfect kata is the one that is done with the heart, they both always explain.
People have discovered what a kata is thanks to Sandra Sánchez, the little girl of karate.
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