It’s boxing. Paris has located it in a neighborhood between Villepinte, cited of the banlieue and Charles de Gaulle airport, and the atmosphere in the huge, packed room lives up to its roots, and all that’s missing is the fog that bites off hundreds of cigars to turn it into a film noir set, because even the impassive and excessively obese referee, in a short-sleeved white shirt and black gloves, fills the ring in a fight between 92-kilo colossi in which there are broken eyebrows, blood and ferocity. There is no alcohol, no betting, no scams, no young men in miniskirts showing the number of each round during the breaks, but an overexcited, demanding and nonconformist clamor, of those who do not forgive, underlines each blow. In the sport of the people, adrenaline is not the monopoly of the boxers. The sport of the macho, too, as is implied by the sudden silence, almost like that of a monastery, that envelops the well-lit ring when female shadows of 50 kilos move in the ring. “They caress each other, they don’t hit each other,” boasts one person in the front row, who doesn’t appreciate the quick arm movements, the agility in dodging, the fine styling of the boxers. Meanwhile, in the henhouse, a woman’s voice that is unmistakably Italian, or more precisely Roman, creates an ambient sound like a neorealist film when she encourages Giordana Sorrentino, her favourite, who, unfortunately, despite her bravery, ends up destroyed by the light fists of the Kazakh Nazym Kyzaibay.
Laura Fuertes is also encouraged by the lonely, almost desperate screams of a woman, but her effect and the rage that drives her are not enough to overcome the rocky Mexican Fátima Herrera, 22 years old, a whirlwind, her first rival in her Olympic journey. The difference in height (six centimetres taller than the Spaniard, more slender, with more arms) is not an obstacle for the Mexican from San Luis Potosí. Her first defeat. It is a hello and goodbye for the first Spanish boxer in the Olympic Games. “I am leaving disappointed,” says the Asturian, 25 years old, her head under a towel, her hands and forearms securely bandaged and labelled with colours, Paris 24, defeated by 3-2 (a tie between the five judges) … “I have tried to show all the work of these years. I think I deserved more. In the last round I connected more than her. This, in any case, has been a very important step for the sport of my country. We must continue working.”
“Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose,” says Rafa Lozano, pure Seneca from Cerro Muriano, Balita, Double Olympic medallist and key technician in the rebirth of Spanish amateur boxing. “Laura started off a bit slow, but she did a good job. The result could have been the opposite. Laura took the initiative well in the combinations, but the Mexican took advantage and was the one who finished off. That convinced the judges.”
Also losing on Saturday was Oier Ibarreche, from Biscay in Barakaldo, in the 63.5 kg category. It was a clearer defeat, 5-0, against Bazarbay Uulu Mukhammedsabyr, who demonstrated with efficiency, technique and punch why his country, Kazakhstan, has replaced Cuba as the great world reference for Olympic boxing.
The Spanish boxing hopes rest mainly on a boxer born in Cuba, in Havana, Emmanuel Reyes Pla, known as The profit, who qualified for the quarterfinals in the 92kg category after defeating the Chinese Xuezhen on points. He thus reaches the phase where he left off in Tokyo, where he arrived with the same aspirations for gold as in Paris. Continental runner-up and world bronze medallist, El Profeta, 31, has been Spanish for five years. He settled with a relative in A Coruña when he arrived in Spain fed up with Cuba, where, despite his quality, he felt marginalised in the processes of the Caribbean country, where they sought to favour, he lamented, a nephew of the Guantánamo giant Félix Savón, triple Olympic heavyweight champion and, together with Teófilo Stevenson, the great boxing myth of the island.
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