Warsaw, Mar 7 (EFE) .- A Palencia sprinter athlete was a real rarity until a man born in Astudillo on July 18, 1993, a soccer goalkeeper until he was 15 years old, changed the stereotype: before him, everything in Palencia it was the background, a gallery of illustrious people with the predominant place reserved for Mariano Haro.
Óscar Husillos, who is called the renovator of the image of Palencia, has introduced a new poster. An athlete from Palencia can also be the 400-meter European champion, as he has just confirmed at the Arena Torun.
For decades the Palencia athletics school had been nurtured by long distance runners: Haro (four times world cross runner-up), Santiago de la Parte. Cándido Alario or Ana Isabel Alonso. People who began to feel comfortable from 5,000 meters.
Then came the Palencia midfielders: Isaac Viciosa (5,000 European champion), Marta Domínguez (who served three years suspended for doping and lost her world title of 3,000 m hurdles), Angelines Rodríguez.
Speed had never been associated with Palencia athletics. Until 2017, when Husillos, aged 23, began to move the record book in Spain with his rides in 200, 300 and 400 meters.
In 2017, the missile of Astudillo, a Physical Education student, put Palencia back on the map of international athletics with his ill-fated 400 world title in Birmingham.
He came to the bounced athletics of soccer. Until the age of 15 he was the goalkeeper of his town’s team. “Normalillo,” he admits. But nine years ago his uncle José Ángel Domingo started him in the popular races. Óscar saw that he was good at that and left the Sports King to go with weapons and baggage to the King of Sports.
On the slopes of Palencia he met the one who was to be his coach -and still is- Luis Ángel Caballero.
Óscar started in athletics, like a good man from Palencia, in long distances: cross country, races of 3,000 meters. But in one of 1,500 he discovered his innate qualities of a great spiker on the sprint and tried his luck in speed.
At the age of 17, he was a 200-year-old youth champion of Spain and at 19 he was a semifinalist at the 2012 Barcelona Junior World Cups, those in which the Galician Ana Peleteiro won the gold in triple at the age of 16.
His consecration came in the winter season of 2017 when just a month after running his first 400, Husillos broke the old Spanish indoor record of David Canal with 45.92 in Salamanca. In the open air he was champion of Spain and reached the semifinals of the London World Cup.
In 2018 he swept the national record tables. He beat those of 200 (20.68), 300 (32.39) and 400 (45.86 and 45.69) and until the World Cup final he had not lost a single race.
His style, with short steps and high revolutions, adapts like a glove to the indoor court, where until now he has shone more than outdoors: in the London 2017 World Cups he fell in the semifinals and in the 2018 Berlin Europeans he was sixth.
The European silver medal obtained in Glasgow 2019 and this gold from Torun definitively drive away the ghosts of his disqualification after winning the 2018 Birmingham World Cup final with the mark that would have been a European record (44.92).
“Of course I have remembered when I lost the medal in the World Cups, but now I am here and I have won. It is not a settled account because a World Cup is a World Cup, but crossing the finish line first has been incredible. I have risked and I have suffered a lot, but it was worth it “, said the man from Palencia after proclaiming himself European champion.
Jose Antonio Diego
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