He had pounded the ship one, two, three, four and up to five times just across the goal.
She had turned her around in the water to get on the helmet and scream at the other Spanish sailors, which applauded from the dike.
He had thrown himself to the ground when he got to the dock.
He had cried like a child.
He had embraced the whole team, he had sung with them “champions, champions”, had briefly called the Bride of Him Carmen, had asked water, lots of water and even spoken with televisions and radios.
After winning the bronze at the 470 in the Tokyo Games, Jordi Xammar had done many things when he arrived in the mixed area and, despite it, he was still trembling.
His hands confirmed that behind the joy for the podium there was something more.
“Yes, is that what I have lived this week … The pressure that I have suffered has been amazing. I was going to sleep, I opened my eyes and the head started ‘Tu, you, you, you, you, you’, A
Take it around. We are not stars of sports, we are normal people that we have worked all my life to be in a few games and, of course, winning a medal is something very important. There is a huge jump between being a medalistic or not being. as
I already debuted in Rio Games, I thought it came prepared for this, but … and if I escaped the medal? “He recognized Xammar, who on Wednesday woke up in Enoshima made a bunch of nerves.
Before the decisive race, the Race Medal, which scores double, admitted that a quarter of an hour had passed, washing my teeth, thinking about what could happen a little later, and claimed a little bit of silence to meditate and concentrate.
He, a hyperactive rate like few, protagonist of a thousand adventures, able to leave Indonesia to help after a tsunami or rescue a lost hiker in Sierra Nevada, suddenly was paralyzed.
“Now I understand my parents,” he commented and developed.
“My parents came from the world of competition, motorcycling, and they did not want me to compete, they wanted to do sports, to learn values, but that did not compete because they knew these sensations, they knew that this is very hard. But I love it
compete. From a very young age I wanted to compete and I wanted this medal. I remember that, when I was 11 years old, after the 2004 Athens Games, Wine Natalia Via-Dufresne to my club, the Club Náutico Garraf, to show us the
Silver Medal and I thought: ‘I want that’ “, I remembered Xammar, son of Pedro Xammar, who ran in 250cc and was a companion of Sito Pons.
At the side of him, his companion Nicolás Rodríguez, was much calmer, the usual attitude of him, the usual contrast.
Since they both met competing in Optimist by Spain fell well for that: one was the storm, the other, calm.
When, after the 2016 Rio games, Xammar called Rodríguez to join him at 470, he did not hesitate because he knew of chemistry.
“I do anything, five years ago, I had left the candle and I was embarking on Holland to work there as a dentist, my profession. When he called me I thought it was my last chance to reed the sport. Being here seems a dream, a dream
That he had already given for lost, “Rodríguez recognized, who was already calculating the seafood who will come,” many “,” and aleps, and the Birras, and a rice with a lobbying with my mother. ”
“As soon as I returned, I invite you,” he said with a smile similar to that of Xammar.
Like him, he began to navigate little, in his case in the nautical of Vigo, and as he came from a sportsman family, but in his case more related to the sea.
His grandfather was commander of the Navy, his mother sailed and his father was a great fan of sport fishing.
Before the 2016 Rio Games – which Xammar went with a companion of his club, Joan Herppershug him left to Las Palmas to try to qualify with a Canarian pattern, Nahuel Rodríguez, but there was no way.
He then left him, ended his dentistry bachelor’s degree and prepared a moving to the Netherlands – where he is the girlfriend of him-he would never get.
Xammar’s call changed everything.
“It’s been all very tense, there’s been a moment I’ve thought: ‘I do not know, I do not know’,” Rodríguez accepted on the Medal Race, which for a moment resembled disasters lived on Tuesday for the 49er classes.
Third parties, with five points on two duos, the New Zealand Paul Snow-Hansen and Dan Willcox and the British Luke Patience and Chris Grube, and in the last stretch of the regatta, one of them, was placed ahead.
Snow-Hansen and Willcox came to be located just a point in Xammar and Rodríguez, just a place to snatch the podium, and each maneuver was more tense than the previous one, every wave was higher than the previous one.
In the end, the Spaniards crossed the goal in fifth place, what they needed, and finally could breathe relieved.
“I feel relief, I feel happiness, I feel … I do not know what I feel, I do not even know what I say”, I recognized Xammar, even with the trembling.
The competition is very hard, although you win the medal that will change your life: your parents were already told.
