Lucas Sáez-Bravo

Updated Monday, January 29, 2024-22:52

That Monday, the day

Ricky Rubio

walked out the door of the Meliá Castilla Hotel in Madrid, everything was already dark clouds. A deep depression, a farewell phrase to

Sergio Scariolo

- "I'm not well, I don't see myself capable" - and a trip to Barcelona to make a decision as brave as it is drastic shortly after: "I have decided to stop my professional activity to take care of my health." mental". The team had not been focused for even 10 days facing a World Cup that its leader would never play in.

«July 30 was one of the hardest days of my life. "My mind went to a very dark place," he confessed yesterday in an extensive interview in The Athletic in which, finally, Ricky revealed everything. The same day he announced the light at the end of the tunnel. This Tuesday, six months after the stoppage and almost nine months after his last official game - six minutes against the Knicks in the last NBA playoffs - the point guard will be on a basketball court. «The time has come to enter the final phase of my recovery. I've been thinking about it for a few weeks and, after many weeks working on my mind and body, I feel eager and strong to see how I react with a ball in my hands. My next step has been to ask FC Barcelona if I could, without any commitment and without interrupting their season plans, train with them," he proclaimed on his social networks.

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The end of the Ricky Rubio tunnel: "My next step was to ask Barcelona to train with them"

  • Editor: LUCAS SÁEZ-BRAVO

The end of the Ricky Rubio tunnel: "My next step was to ask Barcelona to train with them"

Roger Grimau and Víctor Sada

, head and assistant coach,

will be in Barça's training session .

Not far away, the sports director

Juan Carlos Navarro

. All those who surrounded him 13 years ago, when he said goodbye to the club to head to the NBA, a 12-season adventure full of such intense experiences, for better and for worse. There he had to overcome the trance of the death of his mother

Tona Vives

, at 56 years old, due to lung cancer. And, before that, that of his coach in Minnestoa

Flip Saunders

due to Hodgkin's lymphoma. "It was hell, I felt disoriented," Ricky described those days in 2016. Grimau, Sada and Navarro have been key elements, personally and athletically, of a return that the Masnou player has baptized with a peculiar Japanese word: Nankurunaisa .

More than a word, it is a phrase. And it means something like "with time everything works out." This is what the former 2019 World Cup MVP wrote after the announcement of his return to the field with Barça. That's why it doesn't seem imminent, although the Blaugrana have nine days before the player registration period for the Euroleague ends (February 7). Neither the player nor the club is in a hurry, delighted with the reinforcement of the person who will lead them to conquer Europe in 2010.

Ricky has needed time to clear his spirits. «I get chills thinking of the days when everything was dark. There was something clouding my mind that I couldn't get over. Now I am much better with the help I needed to receive, and I am rebuilding myself from the inside out, and not from the outside in," he admits to The Athletic. A pause that stars such as

Simon Biles, Michael Phelps, Kevin Love and Naomi Osaka

have already taken , normalizing emotional education in elite sport. Rubio returned to Barcelona and relied on his family and his intense work with his Foundation. In his wife

Sara Colomé

and in his son Liam, four years old, whom he took to school every day. For the first time in a long time, he was able to spend Christmas with his family, with his father Esteve as well, in Maresme. Little by little he got in shape, first in the gym and then in golf. And, later, also basketball.

And, after resolving his issues with an NBA to which he soon became clear that he was not going to return, he has chosen Barça as the ideal place to return. His separation from the Cavaliers a few days ago was already a declaration of intentions: he would only return to that European basketball in which he debuted at the age of 14. Now he is 33, but there is no sign of basketball decline despite the painful history of injuries, the last one, in December 2021, just a few months after individual heavens such as his display in the Tokyo Games, where he was the top scorer (25.5 points), in "my physical and mental prime."

Nankurunaisa. First train, perhaps then play with Barça in the Endesa League and Euroleague and, why not, this summer an Olympic return with Spain, to those Games that made him known in Beijing when he was only 17 years old.