It happened on July 20, 1976, at the Montreal Games. A girl named Antonia Real Horrach jumped into the Olympic pool and at 12 years, 10 months and six days old became the youngest Spanish athlete to participate in the Games at that time. The record is still alive (Carlos Front entered the eight-man coxed boat in Barcelona 92 at 11 years old, in a strategic position reserved for boys due to his low weight) and Antonia Real, today a 60-year-old retired teacher, mother of two daughters and grandmother of four grandchildren, remembers that time with the affection reserved for unforgettable moments. “What an adventure! It was a very beautiful stage of my life,” she explains. And she travels back in time to tell how a little girl who had started swimming at six years old was competing with the best swimmers on the planet just six years later.
“I was born in Palma on 14 September 1963, the third of four siblings. My father was a national policeman and my mother was a housewife. Living on an island, my parents wanted us children to learn to swim. I started at the S’aigua dolça swimming pool, which was outside, and we could practically only go there in the summer. Until the Club Natació Palma opened in 1970. I liked the water straight away, I felt good, comfortable in that environment. It was easy for me. I didn’t like other sports. My brothers and I joined the club and we lived there, we were a family of friends,” she says.
Antoñita turned out to be a prodigy. At the age of 10 she was the Spanish junior champion in the 100m freestyle and began to compete in long distance events, setting junior and then senior records in almost all distances. “Everything happened very quickly,” she recalls; “in two years I was already winning the national championships and that’s how I achieved the minimum time and qualified for the Games.” The federation did not include her coach in the expedition to Montreal 76 and neither could her parents travel, so little Antonia set out on the adventure with the other Spanish Olympians. She was impressed, she recalls, by the atmosphere in the Olympic village, and especially by the opening ceremony, although not so much by the competition itself. “The pool for me was as always. I was already used to competing in international events. The only thing different was that there were the American swimmers, with whom I never met, but for the rest it was swimming like other times. The moment of entering the stadium for the ceremony did impress me. “To march in front of thousands of people in such a large venue is something I will never forget,” he says.
The young woman was fifth in the 400m freestyle in her series and sixth in the 800m freestyle. Her record was of a different kind. She had made history, although, she clarifies, that “did not change anything”: “My father was very clear that studies were above swimming, and at 15 I stopped competing. Back then there were no facilities for sport that there are now, there were no high-performance centres or anything like that. I went to class in the morning, until 12. When I left, I swam for an hour and a bit until lunchtime. I went back to school in the afternoon and then went swimming again, until the evening. So from Monday to Friday and at the weekends to competitions. It was very hard work.” Antoñita continued studying at the EGB and then studied teaching, a profession in which she worked until she retired last September. Now she will watch the Paris Games, where Naia Laso, the skater15 years old, she is the youngest of the entire Spanish expedition.
Montreal 76 was the Games of Nadia Comaneci, the 14-year-old gymnast who amazed the world. Spain went with a delegation of 114 athletes, including only 11 women, who competed in 13 disciplines. The standard-bearer was the boxer Enrique Rodríguez Cal and the team won two silver medals, in K4 1000m canoeing and in the 470 class of sailing, as well as seven Olympic diplomas. Those were different times, of scarcity and hardship, outside and inside the competitions. The country, and the sport with it, still lived burdened by the past. Antoñita Real was just a girl who swam happily and who, almost without realising it, wrote a curious page in Olympic history.
The case of Carlos Front in Barcelona
In the list of the youngest athletes to ever compete at the Olympic Games, Spain’s Antonia Real has 28 other athletes ahead of her who are more precocious. At the top of the list, with a record that is almost impossible to beat, is the Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, who competed at the first Olympic Games in history, in Athens in 1896, at 10 years and 216 days. He is followed by the English skater Cecilia Colledge, who was 11 years and 73 days old when she competed at the 1932 Games. Her compatriot Megan Taylor, in the same tournament and sport, rounds out the podium at 11 years and 107 days.
The child prodigies classification includes another 10 boys and girls aged 11. Among them is Carlos Front, a boy from Tarragona who was included in the eight-man coxed boat at Barcelona 92 at the age of 11 years and 251 days. It was a strategic selection, because in that position, that of coxswain, children were sought out as they were lighter than the rest of the participants. It was a different case to that of Antonia Real, who achieved a minimum mark in swimming to go to the Montreal Games.
The list is full of boys and girls aged 11, 12 and 13. For example, at the Tokyo Games, the gold medal in street skating was won by the Japanese Momiji Nishiya, aged just 13, and the silver medal in park skating went to her compatriot Kokona Hiraki, a year younger. In Paris, Naia Laso and Natalia Muñoz, both aged 15, are the two youngest in the Spanish delegation, also in skating.
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