Damián Quintero The karate fighter-engineer who does not like to fight
Silver Medal after losing the final with the local Ryo Kiyuna
Sandra Sánchez The intrahistory of a gold without past or future
This is kata The type of karate that is sweeping in Spain
After a life chasing a dream for which he even sacrificed his professional career as an aeronautical engineer, for which he spent almost two decades in the national team, for which he reinvented himself as one of the best karate fighters in the world, when the time came, to
Damián Quintero
, who is no longer a
kid (37 years), he came over the world.
The pressure came like a blow to him already in Tokyo, after a previous concentration in the city of Fujinomiya. And each day that the big date approached the sleep was lighter. And the night before,
Sandra Sánchez
won the gold to the Japanese in the final while he watched him in the Villa room thinking about his more than likely final ... against the Japanese. "You saw us as a sure medal. That is an honor. But if you don't know how to manage it ... Yesterday Sandra left, another added pressure. They have been hard days. I have not slept at all," he confessed already released, with a silver that rounds out the two magical and ephemeral days of Spanish karate at the Olympic Games.
You had to get him out of his black clouds.
"Hey!
Messi
is leaving
Barça",
Pablo del Río
, the team's psychologist
, woke him up in the morning
so that Damián, such a football fan, so culé, would finally escape the weight of responsibility, to release the bad guys fumes.
"The moment there is tension, he gets into his world, he does not speak to you, he does not smile and you have to try to prod him a little", revealed
Jesús del Moral
, an accomplice of the anecdote.
"Well, I don't give a damn right now, really!" Replied the man from Malaga.
And then, now, I was ready.
100 people in Malaga
And on Friday at the Nippon Budokan expectations were met. And Quintero explained, with a handful of international medals around his neck, the irrational, what those Olympic rings suppose that he was going to go to now that he had time and he did not care to wait for the line that there is always to take the photo. "Sportingly, a World Cup is more difficult. But the repercussion ... My mother told me that there were 100 people watching me at a beach bar in Malaga. But I don't know 100 people in Malaga!", He joked.
Damien nailed his three kata in the morning, perhaps the key part, because there he slipped into the final, very far from his three groupmates. And it didn't matter that
Ryo Kiyuna
, the local hero, was in front. With the money secured, the only thing left to do was to put "your heart on the tatami", the best the Buenos Aires-born Malaga can do, whose family, dentists, moved to Spain when he was a five-year-old boy. "I promised myself. I wanted to come to the Games to enjoy it. I had a great time. You know I always make a sulky face when I lose, but not today," he said, without a hint of victimhood, without a trace of complaint about the supposed subjective assessment of the judges.
For the definitive kata, those three minutes without margin of error in which even the smallest gesture counts -even the breath they learn to control- Quintero chose the Supaninpei for strategic reasons. First, because in the 2018 World Cup he had defeated Kiyuna in the final with that same one. And then ... "He looks like a bull, so we had to compensate him in a different way, with a more technical kata, with feelings. I feel more technically complete ... But the play didn't work out," he explained after a day flavored at the end of its journey.
Because Quintero, who in addition to his engineering career has two Masters in sports management, already envisions a life beyond the tatami.
And so he slipped after the achievement of a life.
"In November we have a World Cup in Dubai and I plan to be there and compete to the fullest, as always. But leaving the family behind is becoming more and more complicated. I have already given everything I had to karate," he concluded.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Spain Olympics
sports
Tokyo Olympics Damian Quintero, the karate fighter-engineer who doesn't like to fight: "I put feeling on the tatami"
Tokyo GamesThe fierceness of Sandra Sánchez wins the second gold for Spain in karate
Tokyo OlympicsThe path between pain from Maialen Chourraut to silver: lumbago, dizziness and a cracked rib
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