It’s not raining anymore. The heat has dropped in Rome Olympic. Ana Peleteiro is already crying thinking about Paris, about her Lúa, about the gold, and some disgusting, tame seagulls glide without screaming between the stands. For the first time in history, three Spaniards competed in a final in a European outdoor athletics championship of 800 meters, the most difficult event in the middle distance, in which he who does not kill dies. It has such a bad reputation. So great are Adrián Ben, 25 years old, Álvaro de Arriba, 30, and Mohamed Attaoui, 22. Three generations of the Spanish 800, so flowery. And all of them, all of history, the best Europeans too, are challenged by the youngest, pure dynamite and the energy of an atomic bomb that in the 200 curve, accelerates from eighth place and comes back from the outside, with so much speed that it even seems like he is going to skid, and he gets scared when they tell him, in admiration, the journalists who follow the race, so hard, with their mouths open, they keep him open in the final stretch pushing him to catch up with the Frenchman. Gabriel Tual, an unattainable torpedo even for Attaoui, the restless kid from Torrelavega who runs like no one else. “But what do you say?” Attaoui asks journalists, of whom the technicians, the same ones who have described him as a diamond in the rough for years, say that he runs so easily that he doesn’t even realize how fast he is going. “How did he go overboard? I’ll have to see myself on TV later.”
Attaoui, not so exaggerated, let’s agree, finishes second (1m 45.20s) behind the Frenchman who loves to be the skipper, unattainable for everyone (1m 44.87s) and ahead of the local favorite, Catalin Tecuceanu (1m 45,40s). Further back, fourth, De Arriba, the man from Salamanca who returns to the 800m after a year dedicated to the 1,500m to breathe, to rest mentally and physically from the test of the two laps of the track, gain distance, muscle, breathe and paint a point black marker on the calf where the thumb and index finger of the left hand join, a key to remembering the advice of the psychologist, Arturo Gracia. “I have the freshness of 24 years and the experience of 30,” says De Arriba, who in the 300m takes the lead and sets the pace in the lead (53.11s passing through the 400m) until the last corner, the overflow. of Attaoui, Tual’s kick, the defense of Adrián Ben, the optimistic athlete who had promised an epic finale, like Madrid’s in the Champions League, since he did not see himself capable of winning any other way.
Attaoui remembers his mother, who suffers a lot watching him run, and, like all those in the Spanish 800, so dense, he thinks about the Paris Games, about the place he will have to earn in the Spanish championships, and everyone repeats that it is more It is easier to be world champion than Spanish champion, a meaningful exaggeration. “Moha is a diamond in the rough in terms of physical strength and work who runs super fast. There are many things he could improve on and he is willing to work to do so. He is on his way to being more professional. It will help him a lot that his rivals in Spain are very strong: to beat them you have to be stronger than them,” says Thomas Dreissigacker, the German who trains him in Sankt Moritz, where, like Marta García, medalist in the 5,000m, He is a professional on the OAC team, and there he lives, at 1,800m, in an apartment that is vacated in the spring by ski slope workers, making food, training around the lake and doing series on the Chiavenna slope, After the terrible Maloja Pass, where the sun never shines, already in Italy. And speaking in English. “Whenever we go to train, Thomas tells me, this summer you are going to beat everyone, I see you as the best,” says Attaoui. “The truth is that hearing that from Thomas motivates me even more.”
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