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"I really have a panic of heights. As a child I was a platform player, I jumped 10 meters, but because it was a
must
. As soon as I turned 18 and had a choice, I got off at three meters to stop being always scared. Now there are water I control that fear, I feel comfortable, but if there isn't ... For example, I don't look out on any balcony. Never ", recognizes
Nicolás García Boissier
(Las Palmas, 1995) and admits that it is a rarity, that his of the common: "There are not many jumpers with fear of heights like me. How can there be? I have ever been on a high dive platform [27 meters] or on a cliff and I did not go crazy there" .
Here is a fearful man, as he acknowledges, and at the same time a victorious man, they will not deny it.
Every time he jumps, and jumps many times, he conquers the void under his feet.
A trampoline jumper is defined as one who lives with the fear of the abyss.
Even if he doesn't win a medal at the next
Tokyo Olympics
, he has already won.
"When I was a child they told me to do things and it scared me. Nobody believed that I would achieve anything because they said I was a
shit
. I really value everything I have achieved in this world very much. There is a lot of work from me and from many people behind ", exposes García Boissier, who has an Olympic family like few others.
For starters, a cousin of his mother,
Fernando León Boissier,
was a sailing champion at the
1996 Atlanta Games
in the tornado class. To continue, his brother
Hector
came very close to qualifying alongside him for Tokyo as his partner on the three-meter synchronized springboard.
"The two of us practically started together. As a child I went to the Metropole Swimming Club to swim with the school, I saw the older ones jump and what they did seemed spectacular to me. I wanted to try, I put my head in and dragged my brother. We always jump as a couple. And we even got a mark for the last Pre-Olympic, but ... What happened? That he got a job as an aerospace engineer in the United States, where he went to study, and they didn't give him permission to compete. I had to follow the process in the individual springboard and luckily everything went well ", narrates the canary who will form together with
Alberto Arévalo,
also on the three-meter springboard, the Spanish jumping team.
García Boissier, posing JOSÉ CARLOS GUERRA
After the emptiness of the Rio 2016 Games, the country recovers the path left by
Javier Illana
, present at the Games in
Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
García Boissier's objective is "not to be last, not to be a bad experience ", although the Olympic diploma is repeated like a dream. In a sport with very clear Chinese dominance [in Rio they won seven of the eight golds] the pass to the semifinals will determine whether the Spanish can return home happy. And later? He calls it his brother's path, that is, finishing his studies and immersing himself in the job market.
"It is very difficult to combine both and you cannot live from this sport. I am finishing Naval Engineering, that is, ship design and repair, and I suppose I will throw it around. I honestly do not see myself going from the jumps to an office, but I don't know how long I will continue. Sometimes I think about continuing as long as the body can endure, but it is difficult, "explains the jumper who knows that, if it depends on the body, the body endures. Although he remembers having given "some laziness, the kind that hurt, that itch," he also admits that the consequences of these are slight and that there are usually no major upsets.
"That is why I am not so afraid of heights if there is water," he remembers and thus closes the circle.
Of those first times when I didn't want to jump into the Tokyo Olympics.
From the lost hope of his childhood coaches to the global elite.
From an innate, uncontrollable, gut fear of flying from the diving board into the water.
"If they tell me as a child, I do not believe it. If after confinement, because of the stoppage, it was still difficult for me to throw myself away. I needed my job. Having qualified for the Olympic Games is to be proud," concludes García Boissier, who although he assumes that in Japan he has no chance of winning, that the gold will go back to one of the two Chinese participants, in fact he has already won.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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