Forty years later, I still contort with laughter every time Vicente Egido (76) repeats the anecdote to me.
(And to locate the story, an aside: Vicente Egido, a magnificent specialist in the 3,000 m steeplechase, was 1.80 m tall and weighed almost 80 kilos; he had nothing to do with the skinny and puny specialists of the time):
–It was the seventies and I was on the Nordic tour –he told me again and again–. I was heading to the exit of the obstacles when a British rival approached me and said: ‘I think you’re confused: javelin throwers have to compete there at the back, on the other side of the track.’
–¿…?
–I don’t know if that English athlete was trying to unfocus me or if he was really confused, but he couldn’t block me. I was second, and I didn’t win the race by a whisker.
(…)
Based on anecdotes, Vicente Egido sweetened life for the youngest of us, his athletes. For us, that life was not easy. Life is not easy when ten sets of a thousand meters or twenty of four hundred await you.
Well, actually mine are urbanite whining: Vicente’s life had been more difficult. Especially his childhood.
He tells me about his biography, Un athlete from Salamanca based in Sant Joan Despí, the book that Joan Bonich Vives and Llorenç Lluís Jané have dedicated to him (edited by the Sant Joan Despí City Council).
There they tell us about their origins in Villares de la Reina (Salamanca), a village of one hundred inhabitants, dark and cold, a village of Spain emptied, as they call it today, of the harvesting of chickpeas and the slaughter of pigs.
They also tell us about Vicente Egido’s passion for running, who knows where the kid would come from. The fact is that a physical education teacher would end up inspiring him, and from there a colossal athlete would emerge, as talented as he was passionate: we will never know exactly what lies behind a long-distance athlete, since none of them are looking for money or a job, but rather the desire to let off steam, to feel good about yourself and squeeze yourself like a lemon, so that not a single drop remains, you crazy bunch.
We were all so crazy that we didn’t care about going out there and complicating our lives, ten series of a thousand meters and come on, we can do anything, and so we were obeying the instructions of Vicente, the coach who had inoculated us with the virus and, between rounds And so on, he gave us some anecdotes, to try to distract us:
–And I got busy running around the Camp Nou grass and Rinus Michels made his Barça players run after me.
