• Garazi Sánchez.Waterbreaker: "It seemed absurd to dedicate my life to this"

Almost a year ago, this newspaper agreed to meet Garazi Sánchez on a Sopelana beach to chat about the future, mainly about the Olympic Games that, at that time, were a year away. During the conversation, of course, his period of absence during the previous months emerged. "A back injury, a delicate thing," dispatched the surfer, implicitly showing her desire not to delve into the subject. Out of respect, there it was.

The taboo did not respond to overzealousness or a willingness to hide what had happened to him. Garazi simply was not mentally ready yet to share her suffering and fears with the rest of the world . Now it is and that's why the Biscayan surfer swallows hard and explains her shocking Via crucis: «I caught a wave and I noticed a very, very big pain in my back. I went to get out of the water and when I tried to stand up on the shore, I realized that my legs were not working and I collapsed ».

Those words are the starting point of a project that saw the light on Sunday in the form of a documentary and are accompanied by harsh images in which his father helps him to get up from the hospital bed and grab a walker with which to learn again. to walk. The documentary, which can be seen until this Monday -World Oceans Day- on its YouTube channel, is titled Shame. But it does not respond, of course, to her extremely hard recovery process, but to the activity to which she devoted part of that time, forcibly removed from competition: learning more about the sea that life gives her.

My body had forced me to stop. Partly it was a relief because she had a compelled excuse to stop and reconsider, "she comments during a 23-minute documentary, written and produced by herself, also co-director with Iker Elorrieta, a professional filmmaker. Shame is, fundamentally, a critical reflection on the excessive speed at which we live and on the superficiality with which we treat the environment around us. On how we act from routines without stopping to think about the consequences that our small acts can have on nature. Shame is, in short, a journey to the bottom of the sea of ​​contradictions that we all harbor within us.

“Surfers spend the year taking planes from one side of the world to the other, often without thinking about everything that routine implies. It makes no sense that we are one of the sports groups that we pollute the most, it is the opposite of what it should be, "says Garazi in conversation with this newspaper. Reflections of this type motivate him to meet with a sociologist, a psychologist and the founder of Ocean52 , an organization that works for the care and conservation of the seas and that has actively participated in the production of the documentary.

Collecting these testimonies is what leads Garazi to feel that feeling of "shame" and "hypocrisy" in the face of his "ignorance" about the situation of the oceans, a feeling that he tries to convey in a production initially intended to be exhibited at festivals and tables round and also as an educational tool . The pandemic has altered those plans, which it plans to resume from September. Hence, he has made the decision to open a two-day window for anyone to see on YouTube.

Also, of course, the competition has been altered. The outbreak of the crisis, in fact, caught him in Barbados , from where he was able to return home after a little odyssey. His road book for 2020 consisted of going to the May World Cup to win a place for Tokyo, for the first surfing games in history. The championship has been postponed sine die, with the expectation that it will take place at the end of the year, but without any guarantee of this due to international restrictions and the different evolution of the crisis throughout the world.

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