• JAVIER SÁNCHEZ

    @javisanchez

Updated on Saturday, 17July2021-02: 07

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  • Interview Julia Benedetti, a teenager in Tokyo: "I don't think much about the Games because I have exams"

"When I started we were all from the lower-middle class, we didn't have a penny, all we had was skating. Skating saved my life. As a child I was fine, fine, I was a vandal, and if I don't get to be for the skate, you know where it would have ended. "

Jaime Mateu's

(Palma, 1995)

path

to the Tokyo Olympics saves many celebrations, trips around the world, a multitude of friends, agreements with sponsors ... and the odd episode that is difficult to explain. But let's go to the beginning.

"Studies were never my great asset and when I was 17 years old, I got the license of the skipper of pleasure boats to be a sailor and travel without money. The problem was that the crisis arrived. And since there was no way to find work and the only thing that I was skating, I decided to go to a competition in Chiclana with the little I had saved. I just wanted to try, meet people, have a good time, but I was third, I won about 300 or 400 euros and with that I went to another competition in the Basque Country and then to another ... He put a lot of pressure on me because I needed the money to continue traveling, but things started to turn out. My mother did not want me to skate, it was my grandparents who insisted that I leave, but in the end I almost always returned to Mallorca with money ", says Mateu in a conversation sponsored by Eurosport,that will offer the entire competition from Tokyo in full.

As a child he was a footballer, like so many others, but skateboarding suddenly emerged.

With a robust physique - "I did not break as much as skinny ones" -, soon he began to dream impossible tricks and a little later to do them.

His videos in Palma and his victories in tournaments such as the Red Bull Bowl Rippers in Marseille led him to some popularity - today he has almost 100,000 followers on Instagram - although an episode prior to his qualification for the Games tarnished his career.

"In life not everything is good"

"Nine months in jail for the Mallorcan skater who resisted the Police," La Nueva España headlined in February 2020 after the ruling of the Asturias Provincial Court on a nightly altercation in a Gijón bar that Mateu starred in two years earlier. The versions of what happened are disparate, but they all coincide in the presence of narcotics - Mateu's lawyer presented it as mitigating - in the agitated arrest of a young woman who lunged at two police officers - "I ignore these fucking pig sons of bitches, "he yelled - and in the subsequent intervention of the skater and others present. At the beginning, the Prosecutor's Office claimed for him two years in prison for an attack against authority, but finally it was ruled out that he caused injuries and he was convicted of a crime of resistance to authority.

The still actionable penalty cost him an image problem and, above all, led him to a reflection.

“In life, not everything can be good and people change.

One stops being 18 years old, as I will stop being 25 years old.

That is one of those things that happen when you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, "he points out with the intention of turning the page.

Among his dreams now is "gold for Spain at the Tokyo Games" and, unlike in other disciplines, to stop competing soon.

In skateboarding, competition is often a way of 'showing off', but the fun is often simply inventing a new trick in the pit with friends.

That is why the atmosphere is usually relaxed and all the rivals cheer up.

Although, according to Mateu, that is changing.

«My dream is to earn a living with the skateboard and to live calmly without having to expose myself in competitions.

But skateboarding is not what it used to be, it is losing its essence, now much more money moves ... Now there are children with money who are starting to skate because their parents want them, even because their parents force them, because there is business .

It was not like this in the past.

When I was a child, I would go to sleep at dawn thinking about the skateboard and I woke up thinking about the skateboard », recalls who together with

Danny León

and

Júlia Benedetti will

represent Spain in one of the five sports that will become Olympic in Japan.

Jaime Mateu's path to the Games saves everything.

Now it is here.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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