When a great sports competition is held, no one moves more at ease than the special envoy, since his task is simple and not very demanding: the chronicler is just a voyeur who spins stories while contemplating things.
From his easy chair, the special envoy watches the coach, that wise man who gets nervous and bites his nails when handling his athlete.
The judge, fussy, distrusts everyone and goes crazy. He looks for footprints in the plasticine, scrutinizes fleeting and hasty movements at the starting line, he thinks he can distinguish irregular jumps in the walker’s gait.
The volunteer sunbathes under the hot sun, very hot these days in Budapest, and the athletes, in short, have a hard time. They suffer, they empty themselves. Some, like Mo Katir, walk past the press, refusing to speak. For the most part, they leave devastated.
You can only win one.
I think about all this when I sit under an awning of the Magyar Vendeglo restaurant, in the Buda Castle, one of the recommendations that the great Alfred Rexach, the father of El Mirador in La Vanguardia, had given me.
(Good friends are for these good advice, right?).
And so, al fresco, I have a Rigojancsi, a chocolate sponge spread with melted strawberry whose delicacies few athletes, even none, can afford these days.
Yes, in big events, the special envoy has a better time than anyone.
These days, María Pérez (27), the new world champion in the 20 km walk, has to be very careful with everything she does: she has to move between cotton wool.
Mixed feelings had enveloped her when she crossed the finish line on Sunday, the day of her arreón: she had the gold around her neck, but she had strained her left hamstring, a sting she had felt at kilometer 15, when changing pace, and that she was beginning to torment her right now, as the muscle cooled and the pain became violent.
Coja would leave later, after embracing his coach, Jacinto Garzón, and attending to the press in the mixed zone.
So María Pérez had not been able to march yesterday, she could not loosen her muscles walking on the synthetic that marks the perimeter of Isla Margarita, and rather she had to get into the pool of the Grand Hotel and spend a long time swimming in the water, moving without impact, with exquisite care, waiting to see what the next few days will bring.
(María Pérez still does not know if she will be able to reappear on the scene the day after tomorrow; in the meantime, she intends to collect her second gold in these World Championships, this time in the 35 km; for now, the medical forecasts are good).
Sha’Carri Richardson (23) is an athlete, just like María Pérez, and that is why she is currently engaged in Budapest and cannot take a Rigojancsi, nor can she take a puff of marijuana, an imprudence she knows well.
He has known this since 2021, the post-pandemic Olympic year, when he was listed in the Tokyo gold pools but had been left out of everything on account of a joint.
–If I took marijuana it was because I was stressed and sad. My biological mother had died shortly before. I’m as human as you, I just run a little faster,” Sha’Carri Richardson had said then, between tears, crocodile tears that hadn’t helped her, they hadn’t made it easier for her to be pardoned.
(Recently, he has confessed that he had considered doing “the worst”).
Sanctioned, the supposedly best American sprinter in recent years – she was considered the heir to Wilma Rudolph, Evelyn Ashford or Gail Devers (let’s put an asterisk to Florence Griffith and Marion Jones) – had not been able to explode in Tokyo 2020 (the Games that will be they celebrated in 2021, how to forget it) and neither had he recovered mentally the following year, 2022, two separate triggers that had put his career fallow, an unknown until this 2023.
The unknown was revealed this Monday, the outcome of the women’s 100: Sha’Carri Richardson, taciturn and concentrated, without wigs and without fuss, perhaps scared by her discreet performance in the semifinals (she had stumbled at the start and had barely been able to qualify for times; third with 10s84), exploded later, late at night in Budapest, when she was swimming through the 9th street, apparently disconnected from the race, to knock out the prodigious Jamaicans, silver for Shericka Jackson and bronze for the eternal Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce (Pocket-Rocket hasn’t gotten off the World Cup podium since 2009: there are fourteen medals, including five golds in the 100).
