Asier Martínez, at the moment in which he arrives third in the final of the 110m hurdles. John G. Mabanglo (EFE)
High-flying athletics returns to Munich, to the Olympic Park, to the beautiful stadium in which 50 years ago Mariano Haro, who had prepared the 10,000 meters at the height of Bogotá, stamped against the miracle of oxygenated blood that made fly a Finnish policeman named Lasse Virén.
Thirty years later, at the 2002 European Championships, it was the Spaniards who, good students, better apprentices, practiced the miracles of blood that multiplied their medals on the Munich tartan under the glass roof.
Marta Domínguez, Alberto García, Jiménez Pentinel, Reyes Estévez, José Ríos, Julio Rey, Paquillo Fernández, and their magical doctors led a harvest of 15 medals (six of them, gold, almost a quarter of all those achieved in history ),
“But we have turned all that past around”, says Arturo Martín, Alberto García’s coach at the time and now some of the best middle-distance runners who arrive hungry in Munich, the 1980s Adrián Ben and Lucía Pinacchio, the 1,500m specialist Águeda Marqués , who trained last week in Segovia, and did so with the childlike enthusiasm of children, and with the seriousness of true professionals.
"The young people of today, our athletes, have nothing to do with those."
More information
Calendar, schedules and results of the European Athletics Championships in Munich
The young people of today, the new leaders of Spanish athletics on the track, were still crawling back then, in 2002, when the last trip to Munich, and they arrive with the same ambition for victory, the same competitive spirit, but with a clean.
Their names are Asier Martínez, 22 years old;
Mohamed Katir, 24, and Mario García Romo, 23. Three weeks ago the three already triumphed in the World Championships in Eugene, with bronze medals for Asier Martínez (110m hurdles) and Katir (1,500m), and fourth place for García Romo in the same test, the queen of the middle distance, the one that most identifies Spanish athletics.
They are also called Sara Gallego (400m hurdles) and María Vicente (heptathlon), both 21 years old, the queens of the generation expected in Paris 2024.
And escorting them, the oldest champions, the safest competitors among the 88 selected after a controversial process that has opened a gap of trust between athletes and the federation, the walkers María Pérez and Álvaro Martín (champions of the 20 kilometers in the last Europeans, those of Berlin in 2018), Diego García (silver in Berlin), and the reborn Miguel Ángel López (world champion in Beijing 2015 and European champion in Zurich 2014), who will march, along with Marc Tur, fourth in the 50 kilometers of Sapporo ( scene of the march in Tokyo 2021) and Manuel Bermúdez in the new distance, 35 kilometers.
The Munich festival arrives, strangely and unusually, courtesy of the covid pandemic that forced all the competitions suspended in 2020 to be relocated in any way, starting with the Tokyo Games, delayed a year.
"That's why, because of so much travel, because of the difficulty of planning, because the covid is still active, anything can happen," warns Arturo Martín, who in Eugene saw how his Adrián Ben's finalist streak was broken, eliminated in the 800m semifinals after his finalist positions in Doha 2019 and Tokyo 2021. "There may be explosions of favorites who were very good in Eugene and exhibitions of athletes who did not shine in the World Cup because their objective was the Europeans".
Such fear does not seem to haunt the head or disturb the musings of Asier Martínez, the Navarrese hurdler who was sixth in the Tokyo Games the year he was established among the best in the world, or Mario García Romo, the Salamanca middle-distance runner from Villar de Gallimazo , adored by the very fans, who stayed up late to see him compete in the NCAA tests in the United States and revealed to the general public in the World Cup final with his fourth place and his mark of 3m 30.20s in the World Cup final.
For both of them, not so much for Katir, who will compete in the 5,000m, a test in which he was a finalist in Tokyo, the European Championship in such a symbolic stadium is his debut as the favorite.
Which doesn't seem to shake them either.
"I still think the same as when I was further back and could try to aspire to be in the most expensive positions," says the hurdler, whose mark of 13.17s already raises him to the level of established champions, far from his role as a kid surprise that he arrived at positions that should not correspond to him.
“I think that now, being in those expensive positions, let's say, I think there are going to be many undercover athletes, with brands that are not real.
In the same way that when I was behind I wasn't scared, now, when I'm ahead I don't trust myself or see myself as a favourite.
I'm the same old boy."
García Romo from Salamanca cannot say that he is the usual boy because he is still the new face.
He is the boy of now, in any case.
“And the truth is that I have been very motivated and above all with the desire to show that I am one of the best in the world, because well, I have already been, now I have to keep fighting to continue being”, says the man from Salamanca.
The entire Spanish team arrived by plane to Munich except for Mario García Romo, who took a train in Zurich on Saturday, as he had spent the last two weeks in Switzerland, training at the height of Sankt Moritz, in the Alps.
"I think I'm coming at an even better time than the World Cup, because the truth is that it has been very good for me to train and have a week of consistency instead of competing so much".
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