Just like a train does, athlete and Olympic medalist Ana Peleteiro has traveled distances in her life. Professionally, she even won the bronze medal in triple jump at the Tokyo Olympics. Personally, she became the woman she is today. “The head doesn’t stop,” they say in Galicia. And the truth is that my head never stops. I do something, I get it and I’m already thinking about the next thing. I am competitive in my work, at the end of the day, I have to be, but in life I am ambitious,” she defines herself.
Her grandmother, “a role model for an empowered woman in a very difficult time,” in the athlete’s own words, and also her mother have a lot to do with the brave and feisty person she is. “That she sees a reference in me and is happy to have done well is the thing that makes me most proud, because it means that my mother is proud of me,” she is excited along with journalist Joana Bonet in the series of 12 interviews Mujeres and Renfe Travelers.
In the sporting field, the athlete boasts of having had a father who never set limits for her. “He is a sports geek and I grew up watching the Olympic Games. He has been able to guide me towards those sports in which I considered that I could be one more and in which, due to my concept of a woman, I was not going to be less, even if I were better than all the men. “My father never stopped me,” she celebrates.
That is why it is not surprising that, in 2016, when the University did not make things easier for her to be able to combine her studies with her sports career and she decided to dedicate herself exclusively to sports, her parents fully supported her. “I talked to them and told them “I want to change my life, I’m not happy like this, doing one thing or two things, without being 100%.” Not all parents are able to support a daughter in leaving school and focusing on sports. They did it,” she says proudly.
Her childhood references are marked in her memory. “In canoeing, to Teresa Portela, because he had her there, next to the house. She wanted to do tennis because she played Virtual Tennis and she saw that there were two black women who were sisters and they were great: the Williams sisters.
Today, she is the example to follow for the little ones, not only in sports. Her words “we are black, what color…”, when correcting her friend and also medalist Ray Zapata in Tokyo, went viral. “My messages are always directed, above all, to the youngest children and I think that, at least in Spain, something can change. I receive many messages from mothers with black children who tell me that, thanks to what I said, the boy or girl understood what they had been repeating to them all their lives. Messages like “my son came home crying because they called him black at school and, thanks to your message, he understood it. And now he boasts of being black.
He is not unfamiliar with what these mothers share. She herself experienced this hostility during her childhood: she hit on girls at school who called her black. For this reason, her father spent many hours at the school headquarters and, while her mother scolded her for her rebellion, her father secretly congratulated her for her courage. “I always defended myself and that’s why they respected me,” she remembers.
The medalist learned not to be a victim and became aware that she is a black woman, without nuances or disguises like the word “mulatto,” “super racist,” she clarifies. That is why she wants, with all her desire, for a change to occur. “I think the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement have made racism very visible. There are many things to improve, I doubt my generation will see it, but this is done for the future and, obviously, in the US there is racism that does not exist here. I always say that, in Spain, we are not racist but classist, and that is very sad. You can see me with all kinds of people, because everyone has something to add,” she defends.
A change, forceful and very real, was brought about in Ana Peleteiro’s life by her feat at the Tokyo Olympic Games. “I went there convinced that, if everything went well, my life was going to change. That is a job that I did from home, in the sense that you have spent your entire life betting 100% on sport. Today, I am exclusively an athlete.”
What did you think the moment before jumping? “At that moment, you don’t think about many things. It is true that, when I made my first jump, I concentrated a lot, it was like more euphoria that I wanted to put inside my head. But when I went from being third to fourth, when I really had to think about what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it, I did remember all the bad moments. You have suffered, you have fought for this… Are you going to let a medal slip away like that? The games are every four years and you don’t know if in the future you are going to be healthy enough to be able to go, if you are going to have a last minute problem and not be able to get there. I have it so close… I remember a very brave Ana.”
It is the same Ana who, at all times, keeps in mind that mental health is as important as physical health. “For many years I didn’t believe in therapy, I tried psychology and it didn’t go well. Years later, I found my therapist, my coach Rebeca, and it was a before and after in my life. I learned a lot to relativize, to understand why I had those emotions in those moments and what they meant. And, above all, to be good with myself, to know myself much better. Just like you go to the doctor, the eye doctor or the physiotherapist, not only athletes but all people should go to therapy, because the head is almost more important than the rest of your health,” she warns.
That is why he deeply admires the courage that Simone Biles showed. “Even knowing that she is not well, she tries to go and tries to pass the exam. And for me that is worth even more than the Rio Games in which everything went perfectly,” she says. Ana Peleterio has one thing very clear. “Everyone is going to give their opinion about you. Good and bad. You have to adapt to that and assimilate it.”
