If there is a word that defines Carolina Marín (Huelva, 31 years old next June), awarded this Wednesday with the Princess of Asturias Sports Award, it is resilience. Not only for what she does on the court – she is an Olympic champion of a sport, badminton, whose birthplace is Asia and which she has put on the European map – but above all for what she has done outside of it. . She left her homeland as a teenager to end up at the CAR (High Performance Center) in Madrid because she got hooked on racket and shuttlecock after accompanying a friend to class. She left flamenco and decided to dedicate herself to badminton in a country without tradition and where, in addition, minority sports arouse attention and admiration for two weeks every four years (during the Olympic Games). Marín put herself in the hands of Fernando Rivas, her technician. She worked piecework, in silence, away from the spotlight. She reached the top at 21 years old, in 2014, when she won her first world title. She won two more (2015 and 2018), in addition to the Olympic gold at the 2016 Rio Games, and seven European golds, the last one, in Germany, a few weeks ago. She celebrated it with her team with a barbecue organized at her technician’s house.
“Caro needed that gold, the celebration, the party, for all of us to support her after everything that has happened these years,” said her team, her second family. What has happened to her in the last five years explains why resilience is the word that best defines her: rupture of the cruciate ligament in her right knee in Indonesia in January 2019, operating room, training on one leg, race against time to recover, climb positions in the ranking and try to qualify for the Tokyo Games. In February 2020, her father suffered a serious accident at work and died five months later. When she had just rediscovered herself on the court and was playing like never before, her knee gave way. It was in May 2021, three months before the Tokyo Games. She tore the cruciate ligament in her left knee, the internal and external meniscus. End to the Olympic dream.
That blow would have knocked down not only anyone, but any elite athlete. And yet, Marín is, once again on her feet, with 31 years to turn in mid-June and qualified for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and in the pools to win her second Olympic medal. “If Caro did not also break inside, if he was able to redirect the situation and overcome the umpteenth obstacle, it was because of his mental strength. For his overwhelming talent for self-improvement and in a natural way. Psychologists have protocols for how certain processes work, I prepare them and when you want to realize, she is sometimes two steps ahead. It’s incredible,” María Martínez, the psychologist with whom the Spanish athlete works, explained to this newspaper. Fernando Rivas, her coach, repeated a phrase non-stop, when that second injury: “This is too hard even for someone like Carol, when an athlete like her is injured it is already devastating, but in this case it was also very, very cruel. A month and a half before the Games, she was training as she was training, with very complex strategies that she had just made her own.” That time, the recovery process was different, no picking up the racket after a week. The team decided not to use the word train, but rather “recover” and “rehabilitate.”
He discovered that there was life beyond badminton, that he could, in those first months, combine it with rehabilitation. And her face lit up when she remembered it some time later. “I went camping for a weekend in the mountains, another to Ibiza and another to Denia to a friend’s house. You can’t imagine what it is like! It is enjoying things that you never have time to do.” Because the demands of the calendar, of elite sport, of training… Marín says: “Resilience is a word that I have tattooed on my body apart from the fact that it defines me. I have had many changes in my life and I have adapted to all of them and I continue to adapt.”
In this long process of adaptation and physical and emotional recovery, a side of Marín has emerged that few knew because she had always been in charge of keeping hidden: fragility. Who said that elite athletes are machines that can’t afford to break? “I’m not a robot, I’m afraid too,” she said in an interview with this newspaper. She also confessed, some time later, that her second injury plunged her into darkness, that she wanted to leave him and that what brought her out of the black hole was the little light of the Paris Games. And her resilience and ability to adapt. The same thing that she has conquered the jury of the Princess of Asturias Sports Awards.
As Rivas, her coach, says, it will take “a thousand years” for Spain to have another Carolina Marín again. What, so many years after working with her, continues to stand out is “the ability she has to reconnect, to recover from a bad game.”
You can follow The USA Print in Facebook and xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
