“I have to look into each soul to direct them to a point that they still do not know; That’s where the word coach comes from, from car, from vehicle. “I am the vehicle!”
Andrea Fuentes, the girl who seemed shy and insecure out of the water and then when she swam dragged the entire team with irrepressible force, meditates on the nature of her new mission. He has turned 41 years old. The light filters through the leaves of the trees. Like prehistoric sanctuaries, the temple of artistic swimming in Spain rises in a hidden place. The covered pool in the last pavilion of the Sant Cugat High Performance Center, next to a ravine populated by pines and oaks, is as familiar to the selector as her own house. It is the place that she helped build with the four Olympic medals that placed Spain among the great powers between 2000 and 2012, and the place to which she has returned after refounding the United States team on a trip that is among the greats. epics in the history of this sport and which culminated with silver at the Paris Games.
“When they called me in 2018,” she recalls, “the United States federation was a 70-year-old woman telling me on the phone: ‘My name is Linda Loehndorf, I am the artistic swimming federation. “I am voluntarily working from home and I am looking for a coach.”
“The United States reached the top in the 1996 Games and then completely tanked. In 2017 the coach had problems and resigned. It was like a chain reaction. One left, and another, and another, and everyone left. And a 70-year-old woman said: ‘I will save what’s left.’ The budget given by the American Olympic Committee was $60,000 for the entire country per year. That is: zero. At that time Spain had 500,000 euros for a much smaller country. I told her: ‘Linda, I have no experience as a coach, I have never led a team. Are you calling me?’ And she said: ‘I know you’re going to go far. I have a sixth sense and I know it.’ He had been a judge at the 2012 Games and had seen me swim in the Tango duet with Ona [Carbonell]. And he told me: ‘I have seen you swim and I have seen your eyes and I know that you are going to be a great coach.’ And I said, ‘Are you sure? I have no title.’ And he told me: ‘We don’t have anything else and I believe in you.’ And I told him: ‘Well, I’m going to give my all, so you know!’
The swimmers told me that they wanted to be happy and that if they suffered they would prefer not to go to the Games. I told them: ‘Building something brings happiness, building something good more, and building something together as a team even more.’
Andrea Fuentes settled in California and discovered that things were more twisted than she imagined. The best swimmers in the United States showed no interest in joining a team so sunk in the ranking that it had stopped serving as a bridge to access university scholarships, the main attraction of Olympic sports in a country where it is more difficult every day. finance a career. “No one wanted to be there because they had to be paid,” he recalls. “There wasn’t even a scholarship and you had to move to California, pay for your house, make your own food… all without any advantage because they were 15th in the world and had to spend $3,000 a month. And for what? So I said: ‘The only thing I can give you is a dream, that has no rival. The university will give you security, a path. But a dream? Few people can give it to you.’ So little by little we built the Olympic dream.”
“We started working to be in the Games. And it became difficult. In the first year there was a moment when they told me: ‘We don’t want to train so much.’ And I told them: ‘But if you want to go to the Games you have to train.’ They said, ‘Okay, so we don’t want to be Olympic.’
“I was shocked,” says the coach, still perplexed today by the great resignation. “In my life I would have imagined that a national team athlete would say something like that to me. And I asked them, ‘Okay, so what’s the goal?’ I gave them two hours to find it. They thought about it and came to see me and said: ‘we want to be happy.’
The problem forced her to raise questions that transcended the goal of high performance to investigate the ultimate meaning of a sport that is practiced in teams of eight people sunk in pools more than three meters deep. “What does it mean to be happy?” he asked himself. “I studied. I read many books. One in particular: Every moment counts, by John O’Sullivan. I gathered them together and told them: ‘Building something brings happiness, building something good brings more happiness, and building something together as a team even more.’ I studied hormones, dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, all the hormones that eliminate cortisol and make you feel better. It’s what you feel when you say: ‘I had a good time, I would stay longer, I feel powerful.’ They are hormones. How do you get oxytocin? The union between people causes it. Dopamine is the hormone of progress: I secrete it if I see that I am improving, and even more so as a team. Serotonin is the effort hormone. Paleolithic hunters could not live without it. I said: ‘to be happy we have to grow together.’ That was our slogan: grow together.Growing up and doing something that helps others as a social animal, that is more satisfying than a shot of pleasure from winning a medal. We don’t give a damn about going to the Games. That was the first step. I removed all the Olympic rings from the pool walls. I invented a mission system to make it more fun. They have to have a good time. This generation is not willing to suffer simply because it has to. I noticed that when I did games, mini-competitions, they tried three times as hard. They left their skin. And suddenly we went to a competition and beat France and Greece. We thought: if we beat Greece and France we can qualify for the Games. We realized that we were in a position to go to the Games without intending to.”
Andrea Fuentes built an Olympic team without intending to, as she built herself as a coach, without intending to. Since she was a swimmer and her father, a Philosophy professor, encouraged her to study Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and she began to think about concepts that years later would serve her in California as now in Spain. “My system is four principles,” he says. “First authenticity, this implies that there can be no lies or things behind it. It has to be all clear water. In order to be authentic there can be no fear of being judged. I seek to protect the personal authenticity of each person, not to try to abolish it.”
The first principle of my system is authenticity, this implies that there can be no lies or things behind it. It has to be all clear water. In order to be authentic there can be no fear of being judged. I seek to protect the personal authenticity of each person, not to try to abolish it.
“The second principle,” he points out, “is that of union. Thanks to transparency and authenticity there is trust. If there are secrets, withholdings or judgments there is no union because if I feel judged I have no security to be myself. I have to feel like this is like a family in the sense that I have the security of being 100% myself. Thanks to that, I trust you, you trust me, and we are going to help each other become a more powerful and unique team.”
“The third principle is determination,” he warns. “Because sometimes swimmers confuse my system with the fourth principle, which is fun, optimism, that it is an experience that you want to repeat if you were born again. And they say: ‘I relax.’ I have maximum demands with maximum positivism. I want to empower you and I will never insult you or make you feel small, so I will try not to yell at you or scare you but rather to inspire you to bring out the deepest part of yourself.”
Andrea Fuentes meditates on fear as a tool of persuasion and psychological manipulation. Something that coaches in all disciplines usually use, sometimes viscerally. “Someone who is used to being yelled at or put under pressure based on fear,” he says, “when they see me for the first time they can relax because we talk about life, and I open up because I’m the first to talk to them.” be sincere and transparent. It takes a transition of months to understand it. That I do not say that there is no fear or tension here, in the sense that there is no bad energy, does not mean that I do not get the most out of it, but that I am going to get it even more in the end because I am going to base it on inspiration and love. . One does to others. I’m going to do it because I love you, not because I’m afraid of your reaction, although perhaps fear will always exist because no one wants to lose their place. Me neither, but normally I don’t cause fear. I cause inspiration and respect. “It’s different than what a lot of people are used to in this sport.”
Ana Tarrés and Bet Fernández, the duo of coach and assistant who three decades ago created the Spanish synchronized swimming team from scratch, are like two planets around which the swimmers and former swimmers who pass through San Cugat gravitate. It was they who elevated Andrea Fuentes to the captaincy of the best team in the history of Spain after a long journey through the desert that included being left out of the qualification for the 2000 Sydney Games and narrowly missing the podium in Athens 2004. “I don’t know if I would have done what I did with the United States if I hadn’t experienced as a swimmer what Ana and Bet built with us,” she says. “I arrived in the United States and said: ‘It is possible to take a team from nothing and take it to the Olympic medals. I know it because I have experienced it on my own skin.’ Everything was happening 20 years later. We did not qualify for the first Games in 2020 the same as in 2000. I know what hurts, I was on the team when I was 17… In Paris I told Ana: ‘I am repeating history and I don’t want to be fourth like us! in Athens!”
“I knew what I wanted to repeat and what I didn’t,” he reflects. “And I contributed new things. But without the experience I had with Bet and Ana I would have gone five hundred thousand times slower. In fact I was faster because I saved many laboratory tests. But America is a different culture and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve done there. For me, Spain is not a second course. This is a new first dish that I have never tried and I want it to be the first dish in history. I’m discovering swimmers. And wondering what I want to wear that is something never seen before. If you don’t break the scheme you don’t change the game. I was not born to maintain the game but to change it. It’s dopamine… It sure produces it for me!
The high priestess of synchro laughs at herself. He has been by the pool for eight hours and still has half a day of work left. Their swimmers emerge from the water after a series of endless head-down apnea exercises. They play with the lack of oxygen. Like amphibians. They surround her expectantly and she paraphrases Martina Navratilova to remind them that involvement is not enough: “At the English breakfast the chicken lays the eggs and the pig lays the bacon. The chicken is involved, yes, but the pig is involved. I want you committed!”
