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I had the opportunity to contact a former athlete with an interesting story. Her specialty was high jump, although today, far from the bars, she has participated in several popular races against breast cancer, a reason more than enough to bring her to these pages where women and sports have their privileged space. This Physical Education (PE) teacher in Granada, although she is not a runner “per se”, she is an authorized voice to convey the benefits of physical exercise that she has among her daily routines: “I do a lot of exercise. I run twice a week, another two I climb stairs and another two I do a resistance-strength circuit ”.
Already in the 80s, when the female high jump responded to the name of Isabel Mozún, an athlete with prodigious feet and elasticity “like a cinema”, she wiggled her small body licking the ribbon with her eyes set on the sky. It would have nothing special about other jumpers except the fact that jump over 1.81 m with a height of 1.56 m yes it is to pay attention. After an article by Miguel Villaseñor, for the website of the Spanish Athletics Federation (RFEA), about curious facts about the high jump, that little jumper came to my mind clearly that in the 80s, in which I also did athletics, we were amazed by “his boat.”
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Athletics is governed by numbers, be it time or distance, so much time you take, so much distance you jump… that’s your worth. Then there are factors that enhance your achievements as they are in this case jump 25 cm above your head. This would make our protagonist, Luisa García Vera (Madrid, 1962), if we stick to this measure, would be the holder of the Spanish high jump record and be among the top 5 or 10 worldwide. As data to say that the record holder of the year 83 jumped 1.86 with a height of 1.77 (9 cm) and the current record holder, the Olympian Ruth Beitia jumps 2.02 with a height of 1.92 (10 cm). This curious disadvantage and the memory of those years made me try to contact her to delve into her past history and learn about her current history. I got it thanks to his longtime coach, the ex-400m runner, Ignacio Gómez Pellico also a professor, like her, of EF. It was he who, due to the stature of his ward, began to call her Nani (affectionate nickname for dwarf), a name with which everyone has known her since then.
She herself tells me about her beginnings when she was “discovered” at the age of 12 or 13.
“Ignacio was forming a cadet-category women’s athletics team to participate in what used to be called the School Games and they did so much for grassroots athletics. My PE teacher told him that he had a little student who bounced a lot, and he didn’t leave me alone until he convinced me to train. He would take us in the car to Vallehermoso, where in addition to training, we were left speechless seeing the great figures of Spanish athletics “
But not everything was a bed of roses, curiously “his natural test” was choking him because he blocked when he faced the ribbon by pulling it with his hand. And he left it. However, at the age of 17, she decided to return to training in order to be fit to appear for the INEF tests and that was where her coach’s work took effect and she was cajoled to compete. Although he did length, hurdles and even pentathlon “With terrible results in the shot put” He would soon opt for height, as his explosive strength and good results advised, going from blocking before the bar to attracting him. Siren songs she could hear for her to go to length but she and her coach felt that she didn’t have enough speed for it. Unfortunately at 22 years old, after a series of injuries and the death of his mother did not follow the path marked by the athletics tracks and gave up the sport, in which she had been runner-up in Spain and also Champion of Spain University in 82, both competitions in Santiago de Compostela. His mark of 1.81, made in Oviedo in 83 (mark that I witnessed because I was fortunate enough to win the 1500m test), was not surely his limit, only his official mark because he did jump a few more centimeters in some training session, but that remains for her memory and that of those who saw her, as her coach told me: “A pity that it was not in official test. That will only remain in the memory of those of us who were there ”. Another one of the possible disadvantages that we could attribute to the high jump: you may jump training and without judges a height that on the day of the competition you resist. This hardly happens in a race test.
That year 83, after her great mark, the journalist and international ex-athlete Ángel Cruz made, for the Diario AS, a great report about her with a detailed and curious study and interesting data about the world jumpers that rose the most above the bar with respect to to his height, resulting in that only three of them surpassed Nani in that scale (one with 27 cm and another two with 26 cm) and equaled another two with 25 cm, being the lowest of all of them.
Many calendar pages have fallen but she still yearns for the competition: “I miss her very much, despite the fact that I had a really bad time because of the nerves that entered me. In contests you have to master them for the entire time that the event lasts, it is not like in races, where they fire the gun and run. Even today I find myself dreaming that I am competing ”. AND those dreams also include the one to overcome higher standards: “Without a doubt, I would do athletics again, I think I didn’t reach my limit, it’s a thorn that Ignacio and I have nailed down ”. He does not particularly remember female discrimination in sport: “… To be honest, at that time I was very young and was not aware of the differences in treatment, we had them standardized. But of course there were economic differences ”.
Meanwhile, athletics, which has given it so many values as ““Self-confidence and self-discipline”, he still likes it enormously: “Yes, I love watching athletics. I don’t follow him very closely, but I don’t miss some championships when they show them on television.
And currently, far from his longed-for upright meter, yes runs some races and hangs out with his running partner, his dog Lolo, through the Sierra de Alfagüara when allowed by his classes at the IES de Arizar in Albolote, where he tries to transmit to his students those learned values of discipline and trust.
