“It is with great pain and sadness that I want to tell you that while I was training, when I fell on the descent from a jump, I had intense pain that was diagnosed as an injury to the left Achilles tendon. My heart is broken and I feel so much sadness that I want to “I apologize for not being able to represent you in Paris 2024,” Yulimar Rojas said today on social media.
The news is far-reaching, especially in the athletic world, since the figure of Yulimar Rojas (28) has enormous specific weight. World record holder (15.74 m), invincible athlete for more than five years, all charisma and presence in the jumping hall, the silhouette of this avatar of 1.92 m and barely 72 kilos in weight has been getting bigger in recent times years, until she became an essential athlete, in the line of Armand Duplantis, Eliud Kipchoge, Femke Bol, Karsten Warholm, Sydney McLaughlin or Noah Lyles.
“Today I have to stop, understand this and recover,” wrote Yulimar Rojas, who broke down on Saturday during a gathering of his group at the CAR in Sant Cugat, who underwent surgery last Thursday and who will now live experiences similar to those that María Vicente, a Spanish heptathlete, suffers today, injured like her in the Achilles tendon.
With the injury so recent, the recovery period is still unknown. However, his chances of reaching Paris 2024 (they start in July) are zero, and his medium-term projection, with a view to the next indoor season, is not positive either.
It has been seven years since the athletic huddles turned towards Guadalajara, the temple of Iván Pedroso.
How much is that group of jumpers worth: Pedroso has brought together an extraordinary group of athletes there, with Rojas at the head. Jordan Díaz (the Cuban triple jumper will finally debut with Spain in Paris), Ana Peleteiro, Fátima Diamé, Tiago Pereira and Teddy Tamgho fly in the corridor of Pedroso, a prodigious Cuban jumper who, since the mid-nineties and until the beginning of this century, dominated world longitude.
Among all of them, Rojas is a rare bird, a unique specimen of its kind, since we hardly have any references to Venezuelan athletics. Its importance is capital in the globalization exercise that World Athletics is experiencing, the entity directed by Sir Sebastian Coe and that aims to reach out to all continents, far above any other sporting discipline.
