This is not the time to claim anything. Now is the time to enjoy all this,” says Álvaro Martín (29).
And he smiles, and has almost no voice, since half an hour before he has left his skin in the wide, smooth and flooded streets that surround Heroes’ Square, in Budapest.
For a while now, Álvaro Martín has been the world champion in the 20 km walk.
(Spanish walkers have already collected four of the eight golds of Spanish athletics in the history of the World Cups).
–This is gold for the Spanish march, for my family and my girlfriend, who have come to accompany me these days and are with me through thick and thin, and endure my absences and my days of concentrations in Sierra Nevada or in Font Romeu. And it is also gold for my coach, José Antonio Carrillo, who is here,” he adds.
And both melt into a hug, the smiling coach who never takes off his cap and his pupil who is world champion (Martín is Carrillo’s second world champion, after Miguel Ángel López’s gold in Beijing 2015, in the same distance): both embrace and give us a scene that we do not always live, not always in the world of athletics, since this is an individualistic sport, prone to loneliness and egos, rarely generous with the environment, many times circumspect, indoors.
There are few athletes with charisma and speech.
Álvaro Martín is one of them.
Álvaro Martín has a degree in Politics and is two subjects away from graduating in Law, and these days in Budapest, when he is not training or sleeping, he studies these two subjects, Criminal Law and Procedural Law, and thus shakes off the demons that surround the athlete sailing arms.
Álvaro Martín does all of this, and sometimes, if they offer him the microphone, he also manifests himself.
He laments the treatment received by walkers, a discipline in danger of extinction, since the 50 km have already disappeared, Budapest will host the 35 km for the last time and we will see what happens with the 20 km.
(We can interpret its future if we take a look at the press tent in the area of ??the march: Japanese, Italian and Spanish chroniclers abound; no sign of Americans, British, Germans, Jamaicans or French).
“This is not the time to vindicate oneself,” Álvaro Martín repeats.
In his speech, he is as polite as he is forceful.
The future is intuited in a political or legal career.
Although for now, he is an athlete.
And as an athlete, he is the best.
He has been thinking about it for a long time (he has been a double European champion, in 2018 and in 2022), and he has barely lost anything in 2023.
–In all this year, my worst position had been a second place. And I broke the Spanish record for the 35 km (he will try the double in this distance next Thursday), and I achieved my best mark in the 20 km. I knew that it would come in very handy, although I also had to show myself that we Spaniards not only shine in the Europeans, but that we can also do it in World Cups or the Olympic Games. I needed to show it to those Italians who question us so much.
So it prevails in the apocalypse.
In the apocalypse that surrounds the discipline, we are going to see where it is headed (perhaps María Pérez will give it another hug this Sunday, starting at 7:15 a.m., in the women’s 20 km), and in the apocalypse that collapsed on Budapest this Saturday, a few hours before the start of the test.
It was raining like there was no tomorrow, how good it would be for us in our Mediterranean, and, frightened, the organizers had decided to postpone the start for a long time, two hours, and the walkers who were warming up had returned to the call room, and waited. for the storm to subside.
What hurts me hurts everyone. It was about being calm and waiting – confessed Álvaro Martín, as philosophical as he was resigned, already an old dog in these scenarios.
He contemplates a decade fighting with the best.
Then they had gone out to march, and at the beginning it was still drizzling, and the Japanese Ikeda had decided to break everything, he doesn’t know how to march any other way, and Álvaro Martín had let the Japanese and the Brazilian Bonfim and the Turk Korkmaz do it, until the km 14, when he had finally decided to jump for them: in a jiffy he had had them for breakfast, with a partial of 3m42s in one kilometer, and from there to the end, Castilla is wide.
No one was going to hunt him anymore.
–My strategy was to let things happen, not get nervous and keep a cool head. And when I have seen that the Japanese had problems, I have already decided to attack and never look back.
