After a life pursuing a dream for which he even sacrificed his professional career of aeronautical engineer, for which he spent almost two decades in the national team, for which he reinvented as one of the best karatecas of the world, when the time came,
Damián Quintero, which is not already no kid (37 years old), the world was already leaving.
The pressure already arrived in Tokyo, after a previous concentration in the city of Fujinomiya.
And every day that the great date was approaching the dream was lighter.
And the night before, Sandra Sánchez won the Gold to La Japanese in the final while he saw him in the village room thinking about the most likely final of her … against the Japanese.
“We saw us as a safe medal, that’s an honor, but if you do not know how to manage … yesterday, Sandra came out, another added pressure, have been hard days, I have not slept anything,” she confessed liberated, with a silver that rounded
The two magical and ephemeral days of Spanish karate in Olympic Games.
It had to take him out of his black clouds.
“Hey! Let me leave Messi of Barça,” Paul from the river, the team psychologist, so like, so culé, escape, escape at the end of the responsibility, so that it would release the bad guys.
Smoke.
“At the moment that there is tension, he gets into the world of him, he does not speak to you, do not smile and have to try to puncture a little,” Jesus revealed from the moral, accomplice of the anecdote.
“I do not care about a fuck right now, the truth!” The Malaga replied.
And, then, now yes, he was ready.
And on Friday at the Nippon Budokan the expectations were met.
And he explained Quintero, with a handful of international medals around the neck, the irrational, what they suppose those Olympic rings to which he was going to come now that he had time and gave him the same as much waiting for the tail.
“Sportingly a World Cup is more difficult, but the repercussion … my mother has told me that there were 100 people seeing me in a chiringuito in Málaga. But if I do not know 100 people in Málaga!”, He joked.
Damián nailed his three katas in the morning, perhaps the key part, because there he sneaked into the final, far away from his three groupmates.
And he already gave himself as opposed to Ryo Kiyuna, the local hero.
With the money assured, it was only put on “the heart in the tatami”, the best he knows how to make the malaga born in Buenos Aires, whose family, dentists, moved to Spain when he was a five-year-old boy.
“I promised it, I wanted to come to a few games to enjoy, I have spent it like a dwarf. You know that I always put a sulkly face when I lose, but today,” he said, without a glimpse of victimism, without a trace of complaint about the
Supposed subjective assessment of judges.
For the definitive kata, those three minutes without a margin of error in which it counts up to the slightest gesture – the breathing will learn to control-quintero chose the Supaninpei for strategic reasons.
First, because in the 2018 World Cup he had defeated Kiyuna in the final with that himself.
And, after … “He looks like a bull, so it was necessary to compensate him differently, with a more technical kata, of feeling, I feel more completely technically … but we did not get out of the play,” he explained behind a day.
With flavor at the end point on your trajectory.
Because Quintero, who in addition to the engineering career has two masters in sports management, already glimpses a life beyond the tatami.
And so he slid him after the achievement of a life.
“In November we have a World Cup in Dubai and I intend to be and compete to the maximum, as always, but let the family back becomes more complicated, I have already given everything I had to Karate,” he concluded.
