Thierry Ndikumwenayo speaks very softly, but at the same time, in reality, he speaks very loudly, in the mixed zone, a few minutes after having achieved his first major medal as a Spaniard, third place in the 10,000m final of the European Championships. Rome. “I needed this medal,” he says with relief as he takes small sips from a bottle of water. The athlete born in Burundi and naturalized Spanish in 2022 does not have the volcanic character of Jordan Díaz, who jumped and threw himself towards the stands to high-five his people the night before. This 27-year-old young man, quiet, reserved, clenched his fists, took photos with the flag and left the Olympic.
The 1.60m runner fought against his rivals and against his conscience. On Sunday he failed in the 5,000m final and since then everyone told him that he couldn’t reserve himself that much, that he had to shoot first. “But if you shoot, the only thing you get is to play hare to the others and then everyone beats you,” he explains with overwhelming logic after seeing what happened to the British Patrick Dever, one of the favorites, who collapsed after accelerating. the race and finished sixth, off the podium, like the great favorite for the gold medal, the Swede Andreas Almgren, the European leader of the year, who could only be fourth.
The victory went to Dominic Lobalu, the young man who was born in South Sudan, who was welcomed in Kenya and who finally escaped from the team taking refuge in Switzerland because he suspected that they were deceiving him. He has now begun to compete for the country of the white cross and his debut in the European Championship has been outstanding: the victory in the 10,000m and a bronze in the 5,000m final in which Ndikumwenayo could only be fifth. A result that was a stab wound. El Tigre, as he likes to call himself, woke up in the middle of the night distressed by this disappointment and pressured by this Wednesday’s revenge. “I had a lot of stress,” he laments.
Call to his mother
The race went very slow. They passed the first 1,000 at the same pace (3m07s) as in the women’s final the day before, when the Italian Battocletti crushed her rivals. The group did not react until passing through the 5,000 (14m30.41s, still slower than the B final, which had been played before and in which Jesús Ramos beat Eduardo Menacho). That did not go with Ndikumwenayo or his compatriot Abdessamad Oukhlenfen, who finished eighth and who did not appear in the lead until the final laps. Nobody believed in the Tiger, too far behind, apparently without a very explosive finish (“this is something I have to improve,” he will say later), but in the last lap he kept the pace of the best, he made progress and in the final stretch he beat Algren and slipped into the top three, behind Lobalu (28m00.32s) and the Frenchman Yann Schrub.
Ndikumwenayo complied in the mixed zone and then picked up his phone and called his mother, who always encourages him from a distance, happy for the career of one of her nine children, the brave one who left his home in Kiryama (Burundi) when he was almost a teenager, to train in Alicante with Llorenç Solbes, a coach who welcomed athletes from disadvantaged countries. Then, in 2020, without company in the middle of the pandemic, he decided to go to Castellón to be close to his club, Playas de Castellón, which helped him prosper and hired Pepe Ortuño, a veteran coach, to turn him into a champion.
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