Dining hall at the University of Southern California (USC) where the Olympic Village was located during the 1984 Los Angeles Games (yes, there is a story to be told). I find myself in line thinking about absolutely nothing, a quality that we humorously tend to consider eminently masculine. I come out of my lethargy as I approach the hamburger area (our diet was not very healthy (so to speak) but there was something that prevented me from getting a good view of that festival of animal fat. It was the endless body of the German swimmer Michael Gross. Note for the younger ones. Michael Gross was something like the Michael Phelps of the eighties. He won medals galore, but more than his resume, I was impressed by his natural physique. He was 2.01 meters tall and with a wingspan of 2.11 meters, he could hug five people at once. That’s why they nicknamed him The Albatross.
Thanks to a host of factors related to training, care, nutrition and scientific advances, athletes are getting taller, stronger, faster, more skilled and more resilient, more of almost everything. Gone are the days when talent and technique could allow you to survive without a remarkable physique. Nowadays, in most disciplines, if you don’t have a body to parade around the beach and arouse admiration, it’s bad business. So far, so good. We evolve little by little and our abilities increase at a similar pace as the demands. But suddenly someone comes along who makes you think: ‘Wow, this guy has jumped two or three squares at once’. Gross was an example, LeBron James too. And what can we say about the newcomer Victor Wembanyama, a 2.24m angel capable of even playing point guard. I think about this while watching Antetokounmpo, another evolutionary leap, during the decisive Spain-Greece game. In his case, the key is in the amount of movement.
My memories of what I studied in engineering have been reduced over time to three or four things. Archimedes, Pythagoras, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is only transformed and little else. Oh, and the thing about the quantity of movement, which is the product of mass and speed. If you are a guy like Antetokounmpo, 2.11m tall and square as a wardrobe, you are muscularly sculpted from marble, you take huge strides and you move like a sprinter, the end result is that you end up generating such a quantity of movement that you take everything in front of you. The Greek star is a superman, ahead of his time, but because basketball is a collective game, he is not invincible.
Spain’s basketball has bodies, but it doesn’t have great bodies. Scariolo had already warned. These disadvantages force him to choose other paths to try to alleviate them. They need good aim, cunning in alternative defenses, clarity in attack, contributions from the greatest number of players possible and above all, the closing of the defensive rebound by all, a real headache until now. Spain did better against Greece than against Australia. More accurate in the triple, almost always had someone to pull the cart and kept calm in the last moments. And watch out for Santi Aldama. He is a body, not a great body, but his step forward in the team hierarchy is obvious. At one point he even played on equal terms with the Greek beast, showing a character that contradicts his good-guy face. Spain is still hanging by a thread and Canada awaits, another squad of NBA bodies. But we are much better than yesterday.
For bodies pushed to the limit in terms of power, resistance, balance and elasticity, those of the gymnasts. I attend as always, amazed by the pirouettes and always afraid that at any moment they will fall off the uneven bars or the beam, a diabolical apparatus if there ever was one. I also don’t relax on the floor exercise, where Simone Biles does incredible things, and I worry about her ankles every time they rise three or four meters doing turns in the air on the vault exercise. But leaving aside my neuroses, the show is wonderful.
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