Look, the day has dawned bright. I slept eight hours, I took a walk with my dogs until nine in the morning, when it was already approaching thirty degrees, and they looked at me and said: What, maybe we’ll go home and turn on the air conditioning. Have breakfast and come on, let’s see how the marchers are doing. And boy, they were doing like a shot. So much so that when Álvaro Martin passed the last baton to María Pérez, the medal was secured barring a catastrophe. This has allowed the protagonists and fans to enjoy a great success to the fullest and without stress, which is appreciated, as so many days and emotions need a break from time to time.
To make up for that calm, there is no one better than the men’s handball team to get on your nerves again. Even taking into account that today’s equality in many sports makes it difficult to make big differences, the agony in the successes of this group is superlative. Egypt, starting from an early lead, refused to recover time and again. Spain tried, but nothing, it was impossible to complete the comeback. Until just in the last minutes the Egyptians broke enough to take the game to extra time. The end, in keeping with the game, was agonizing, epic, unforgettable. As was their day, hours later Germany eliminated the host France in another tachycardic end in extra time and will be the ones who will play for a place in the final with the Spanish. I am sure that they smiled when they found out.
From here on, the day has been metaphorically cloudy. The men’s water polo team has been beaten by Croatia, ruining their great work so far. The women’s basketball team has lived a nightmare from the second quarter onwards, where they have lacked physicality, play, patience and solutions against an extraordinary Belgium led by two real nightmares like the great Meesseman and Linskens, too big, too good. Adriana Cerezo, one of the most solid options a priori to do something great, did not fare any better. This is what is expected of someone who three years ago and at 17 years old, already won silver. At twenty years old, she has already known success and failure, two good teachers of life.
What happened with water polo and basketball, which were spotless in the group stage and already on their way home, makes me think. Team championships are divided into two phases. Positioning and cross-overs, two very different worlds. In the first, without forgetting to qualify, it is about getting ready, having good sensations, fine-tuning individual and collective mechanisms as finely as possible. In the second, you start from scratch and the element of vertigo in front of the precipice comes into play. Playing with a net is not the same as doing so knowing that if you fall you cannot get up. The one who behaves best in this scenario of great emotional demand is usually the one who takes the glory. Handball players, for example, have been masters in these arts for years, as was Gasol’s Spain, who took a nap just enough in the qualifying phases to arrive with the hammer to the final stages.
I end my day with a classic: synchronized swimming, now called artistic. I like it better, because what these girls do has much more to do with art than just coordination. To my usual concern/foolishness (so much time in the water can’t be good for the skin) I add my complete ignorance of where the merit lies and where the error lies, I suspect the thousands of hours of training they have on their bodies and I always distrust the referees, who I think will score us less than we deserve. But it doesn’t matter, what I see blows my mind, especially the underwater shots, where you can see the engineering behind each external movement. It’s amazing what these women are capable of doing. In the end, the USA takes the silver and Spain a beautiful bronze full of work, anguish and art, a lot of art. Now it’s time to enjoy it.
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