The ordeal of Noa Ros, retired at 19: "I can't stretch my back"

"It was sudden.

One day I went to train as usual and the next, on April 1, the doctors told me not to do it anymore.

Every time I straighten my back, more if I do an extension, I'm forcing and it's dangerous.

On the phone, the former gymnast

details the reasons for her very early retirement at the age of 19 and, although her voice breaks, and she needs a few seconds to pause, and she has to push her own words, she claims to have lifted a weight off her shoulders.

She had been suffering for a long time.

She knew something was wrong.

It all started, like so many things, at the top.

In the summer of 2019, Ros, who had just turned 17, was proclaimed individual Spanish champion and ranked among the top 25 in the World Cup.

The goal, close, possible: a place for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. The problems since then, many, many.

«I started to suffer many injuries in my left leg.

A heel fracture, a calf and soleus break, continuous knee and ankle sprains and when the 2020 confinement arrived, very intense pain in the hip.

We assumed that the problem came from there, from the hip.

And at the end of that year I had surgery, with a very long rehabilitation, of nine months.

Last summer I returned to training, but the injuries also returned: a quadriceps rupture, another of the fifth metacarpal due to a fall.... That left leg always failed me.

And I already thought that something was happening there.

In the end they looked at me where everything came from and discovered that I had radiculopathy, possibly due to a fissure in the back, of the L5 vertebra, which I suffered from years ago.

It seems like,

Operate or not operate

As he begins his studies in Psychology, he hopes that the doctors will propose a solution: perhaps his radiculopathy can be solved in the operating room, perhaps it is too risky and he will have to live with it for the rest of his life.

The tests, in which she is already immersed, will last several weeks.

“I want to wait for this process to finish.

If they have to do an operation near the nerve, I don't know what I'm going to do because, in my sport, I know of some cases with bad results.

At the moment I can't stretch my back, I have to go curved.

They also told me that in one way or another this will always affect me.

That's why I decided to leave gymnastics », she explains that she was a gymnast of the Spanish team since 2016, when she was still a junior, until recently.

In recent days, Ros has received numerous messages on her social networks, especially on Instagram, where she still stars in Stories and more Stories today, and that has served to lift her spirits: «The truth is that it has helped me a lot.

She has made me see that these years, all the efforts, were worth it.

I have had many experiences and made many friends.

The beginnings, in the mountains

His history in gymnastics connects with other similar ones, all united by the exaggerated precocity that sport demands for good and for bad.

This same week, the last Olympic champion, the Israeli

who broke the Russian domain that lasted decades, announced her goodbye at the age of 23 without injury, simply due to fatigue.

Ashram practically started training as a baby and she had been immersed in her demands for too long.

The case of Ros was different in that sense.

The Spaniard was never a gym girl, quite the opposite: her parents were mountain lovers and she practiced mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding or climbing before she even knew what a spagat was.

But one summer day at a campsite in Switzerland...

«There was a boy and a girl who did not stop doing somersaults, who were jumping all day... they fascinated me.

I didn't dare say anything to them, but since I had a very nice dog, one day they came over to pet him and I asked them what they were doing.

They told me that they practiced gymnastics, I followed them every day and when I returned home my mother signed me up for the only gym in Benicarló.

What the children from the campsite did was artistic gymnastics and the gym was rhythmic, but she gave me absolutely the same.

It was 2011, I was 10 years old and I was training right there until last April 1”, Ros concludes.

According to him, he has once again found comfort in the mountains, on walks, in sports "with a lot of control, without impact and without lifting any weight", while adapting to a life without a rope, without a hoop, without a ball, without clubs. and without tape: «Now I have to make up my mind and adapt.

I won't be able to do gymnastics anymore.

I guess that's what it is."

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