Consuelo Font
Updated Wednesday, January 31, 2024-21:31
Interview David Meca: "I don't care if the person who hit my mother was black or platinum blonde"
David Meca, who
turns 50
this Thursday, February 1
, and retired from competition in 2005, prefers to be
remembered as a fighter
rather than as a world swimming champion. And that, in open water and in his discipline, he is considered
the best in history,
which, translated into kilometers, amounts to having swam three and a half times around the earth.
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His existence is an example of improvement, since he had
a very difficult childhood,
due to his health problems: he suffered from
asthma
and also a serious back problem that forced him to
wear irons on his legs
and orthopedic boots; Furthermore, the medication he was taking was so strong that his baby teeth were blackened and broken. By medical prescription, at the age of 5 his father (
the villager
, an aspiring bullfighter who left his native Jaén to settle in Catalonia but did not go beyond being a bullfighter) took him to practice swimming in a pool in Sabadell, the Barcelona town where David was born. .
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By the way, her mother, Dolores Medina, made the news in 2019 after being
beaten and thrown
to the ground by a mantero in Madrid's Puerta del Sol.
When he was 8 years old, they woke him up at five-thirty in the morning to go swimming, even in the middle of winter, even though
he cried bitterly
because he didn't want to go. However, the sport would work a
miracle
, because in addition to curing him and giving him a perfect body, which he continues to train daily even though he no longer competes, it gave him
money and fame.
He has participated in several television programs such as
Gran Splash
or
Mira qué baila
and even tried his luck as an actor in series such as
Aladina
, in addition to
starring in a documentary
about his life on Movistar +,
Camino interior.
With more than
one hundred international titles
in his brilliant record, he has won eight world championships, four European championships and they say that if open water swimming had been an Olympic discipline when he competed, he would have won more than one medal.
Among his many feats,
in 1999, he swam the journey from the mythical Alcatraz prison to San Francisco
with shackles
on his wrists, and that same year he broke the speed record by crossing
the Strait of Gibraltar
in two and a half hours. He was also the first to swim
from the Peninsula to the Balearic Islands
through Jávea, a journey in which he invested 27 hours without rest and another of his challenges was to do the Camino de Santiago through the Galician estuaries.
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One of
his worst moments
was when in 1999
he was suspended for doping,
which made him tour the best laboratories in the world to
prove his innocence,
something he achieved in 2000 on the eve of the world championship in Hawaii, where, despite having been
Away from the competition
, he won four medals, one gold.
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Swimming, which, as he acknowledges, has given him
everything
, also allowed him to obtain a
university degree
because after winning the Spanish championship at the age of 18, he obtained
a sports scholarship
the following year to study Architecture in the United States. A profession to which
he has dedicated himself after retiring
from competition and which he combines with
motivational talks
such as
coaching
, where he applies effort as a method to achieve goals. It is aimed above all at
businessmen
, since like the sea, the company is always in motion, threatened by currents and sharks. He also usually publishes tips on his networks to improve
swimming
techniques and
has written two books
Swim, get what you want and I am not afraid of sharks.
As an architect,
he has a family construction business
that is dedicated to renovations, buying houses to rehabilitate them and then selling or renting them. He owns a
beautiful penthouse on
Madrid's Gran Vía and in Barcelona he also acquired two homes, one of them
an old convent
where Shakira and Piqué lived rented when they began their relationship.
David Meca acknowledges that he is
now experiencing the stage of youth
that he could not enjoy, because he was focused on competing and studying, and he was not known to have any courtship while he was competing. Very discreet with his love life, of which he has revealed very little,
he has never revealed the identity of his partners
although he has always expressed his desire to get married and be a father.