Alba Vázquez, the teenage world record who learned to swim "to float"

The girl was very young and never wanted neither sleeves nor float. Neither on the beaches of Huelva nor in the pool. Her mother, terrified of the possibility that she would fall into a pool, drown and get out of that heartbreaking news, pointed her in swimming three days a week "to float, nothing more. It started with three years and there it continues ». And little Alba Vázquez not only floated, but continued swimming, until a few days ago at the Junior Swimming World Cup in Budapest the world record in the 400 styles (100 meters in each style: butterfly, back, breaststroke and crol) , besides gold. Alba also achieved silver in the 200 styles . He thought he was going last and when he touched the wall and raised his head, he saw the Spanish stands turned upside down ... His impressive comeback earned him the money.

This is a story about what is not told about sports triumphs. The small print that every elite athlete knows and knows that is written with sweat, effort and sacrifice . It is the part that does not occupy more than two sentences in a press conference and that is barely visible in the pair of tears of emotion that usually emerge in that ephemeral magical moment in which you get on the podium. This teenage girl born in Las Palmas knows it on February 24, 2002 and raised in Huelva. His parents know it too .

Leo, his mother, is 59 years old and a housewife. His father, Juan Antonio, is a 63-year-old former taxi driver who provides the only salary that enters the family home. The precariousness of the sector in the Huelva capital caused him to leave the taxi to pack up and go to work as a waiter in Ciudad Real . In addition to Alba, the marriage has another son 24 years older than the swimmer and who no longer lives at home. "No one in the family is dedicated to swimming: she is the first, because she is passionate about it, " says Leo.

The girl today has a prodigious physique (1.80 tall and 42 standing). It is very tall and strong. But "in addition to extraordinary physical abilities , she is a very good companion, hardworking and responsible, " says Crónica Charo Martín, the president of the Colombian Swimming Club of Huelva, to which the new junior world champion and record belongs. To his genetic qualities, Alba adds an iron will that makes him take care of his diet, save his hours of sleep and comply strictly with workouts. "It's going to go far," says Charo convinced .

The family lives apart so that she dedicates herself to her passion and has arrived where she has done it. In the parents' small print there is a great paragraph for the kilometers: the 425 that separate Juan Antonio from his home in Huelva - he barely sees his family - and the 900 kilometers a week that Leo does, alone in his car , to pick up his daughter every Friday at 7 pm at the Technification Center of the Andalusian Swimming Federation, in Malaga. They arrive home at night, spend Saturday, and on Sunday take her back to Malaga and return to Huelva. We must also add the distance traveled to take her to participate in many championships. With only eight years, he won the Doñana Triathlon, in his homeland [in the picture]. His first serious competition was in 2013: the Andalusian Winter Swimming Championship, juvenile category. It was the first.

An ordinary day in the life of Alba Vázquez, in Malaga, begins at 5.30 in the morning . After the alarm rings, the 17-year-old girl throws herself into the pool to do her first training. At 8 he goes to the institute. Eat at 2.30 pm and at three return to the pool. After a half-hour warm-up, train until six in the afternoon. After an hour of gym, he returns to the residence at 7 , where he studies a little, has dinner and goes to bed.

The glimmer of the triumph of Budapest also hides that on weekends, when Alba arrives home, she is locked in to study so as not to delay her education, and that when she is concentrated in Sierra Nevada for a week or two, she is unable to attend class and must then recover time by stealing it from his few leisure moments. It also hides that it is possible to swim while crying, because there are days when muscles ache during very hard training sessions.

Alba, the 17-year-old teenager, has not had a vacation this summer : she has been polishing biomechanical aspects in her technique to improve her time for the Budapest World Cup. He polished them so much that he broke the world record: 4 minutes, 38 seconds and 53 tenths in the 400 styles. If he had measured himself in the absolute category, he would have been the seventh in the Gwangju World Cup ... and would have taken 3.5 seconds to Mireia Belmonte, whom he deeply admires. On the way back, as champion, she has only had a week off, which she has invested in attending, excitedly, to the media. On September 15, training begins again to fight to continue transforming the small print into gold letters of Spanish sport .

According to the criteria of The Trust Project