An Olympic champion and Ana Peleteiro meet in a charming athletics stadium in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. It is the press conference on the eve of the Canarias Athletics Invitational, a new rally. “You’re a jumper, aren’t you?” the champion, whose name is Daniel Ståhl, is Swedish and throws the discus, asks her in English. He has just landed from Stockholm and the smile drawn by the strong wind that blows from the north, from the ocean and shakes the palm trees at the entrance to the runway cannot be erased from his face. The perfect wind. The dream of the discus thrower, to make his three-kilogram discus plan and go over 70 meters. “Yes, triple jumper,” responds the Galician athlete, who also cannot erase from her face the smile she was wearing when she landed in the Canary Islands, a double smile, drawn both by the constant view on her mobile phone of videos of her daughter Lúa, year and a half, balancing in the garden of his house and playing between the fences of the Guadalajara track, as if for the inner satisfaction of knowing that he is in top shape, stronger than ever, and how good the wrinkled potatoes are. And she verbalizes it. “I’m better than ever, I’m…” she says. And she repeats it later, when asked what the injury of her training partner and unattainable triple jump world queen, Yulimar Rojas, Olympic champion in Tokyo on Sunday in August, in which she won the bronze medal, changes in her mind. He ruptured the Achilles tendon in his left leg the first week of April. “To be completely honest,” says Peleteiro, “until a month ago I was training to be an Olympic silver medalist and now I am training to be an Olympic champion.”
The wind loves Ståhl, who does not hide a whistle of admiration for the world record (74.35m) achieved a month ago by the Lithuanian Mykolas Alekna in the windy Ramona launch pad, in Oklahoma. “It was great news for athletics. He finished with a record of 38 years. I was very happy. Mykolas has great talent, he is very technical and he is very young. Surely he will throw more,” says the Swede, 31 years old, 202 centimeters tall and weighing 160 kilos, and a double world champion as well. “I have come here to have fun with good pitches and to put on a show.” His best mark, the fifth in history, is 71.86m, and dates back to 2019.
The wind on the Tíncer track, the one at the snowman roundabout on the border between La Laguna and Santa Cruz, does not matter to Peleteiro, 28, who only wants to jump in competition, which he has not done since he was third in the Indoor World Championships, two and a half months ago. “A new season begins,” says the Galician, who will only compete in one other rally, in Castellón next week before the Europeans in Rome, in mid-June, and the Paris Games, on August 3.
The wind that will not stop could ruin the aspirations of a good mark by Bruno Hortelano, who will run the third 200m in the last two years, marked by doubts and few competitions of the current national record holder of 100m (10.06s), 200m (20.04s) and 400m (44.69s). The Turkish Ramil Guliyev, world champion in 2017, will be the reference for Hortelano, who trains in Madrid with Pedro Jiménez Reyes and hopes that the meeting on the Tenerife track in which he returned to athletics in 2018 after destroying his right hand in an accident after being a semi-finalist in the Rio Games is the beginning of a season with continuity, only focused on the 200m. “My goals are still the highest,” says Hortelano, 32 years old. “If not, I wouldn’t continue working as hard as I do.”
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