On Sunday, at the Adidas final party in Paris, a young woman with a wonderful voice sings a gospel song that gives you goosebumps and moves you. Then, she is introduced: Yemisi Ogunleye, Olympic shot put champion. And it is not clear what impresses those who applaud the German athlete more: her voice or her slimness, 1.83 metres and 67 kilos, which does not clash with the athletic morphology associated with shot putters, whom everyone imagines as enormous colossi, and the bigger, the stronger. In Friday’s final, with a miraculous sixth throw that left four kilograms hanging on the 20-meter tape, Ogunleye, 25, a junior heptathlete until she tore ligaments in both knees and has been a weightlifter ever since, bested New Zealand’s Maddison-Lee Wesche and China’s Jiayuan Song, two larger athletes.
These are the new times of the spinning throw, in which height and speed are more important than mass or volume. And, above all, technique, the basis of the throw, not in the new times, but always, and 70 years ago, in the 1950s, Galina Zybina, Soviet shot putter, discus and javelin thrower, and Olympic champion in Helsinki 52, who died on Saturday at the age of 93, constantly repeated it when asked about the hidden subtlety that makes the ball go further. “Technique. It is something that must be constantly perfected. To develop great speed, each movement must be executed perfectly. It is a meticulous job, which many people today do not want to do,” she specified a few years ago in an interview with the Russian media. Sport Express“It is easier to pump up muscles with a barbell and anabolic steroids. There were throwers with bedside tables or chests of drawers. And there are no small and thin people like me or the thrower Nadezhda Konyayeva, bronze medalist from Melbourne. Do you know how much I weighed when I won in Helsinki? 69 kilos. For a shot putter, it is an unthinkable weight. But soon the weights started to come in. comfortable. And those that I could beat by sleeping, suddenly started throwing 18 or 19 meters. Boo! What are they eating?
None of them would leave the mark that Zybina left on Picasso, whom she met and for whom she threw a brick. “In 1954, the Komsomol [Liga de las Juventudes Comunistas] “I was sent to France. There were 16 people in the delegation: musicians, physicists, mathematicians. I was the only athlete. We met with French students. We toured 24 cities in 24 days, a kind of Tour de France,” the athlete says. “When we passed through the southern town of Vallauris, someone suggested that we stop at Picasso’s house: ‘He has a house here, he recently painted a chapel…’ I had no idea who Picasso was. And I was exhausted from the trip. I decided to take a nap on the bus. After a while, the interpreter came back. ‘Galya, help me!’ It turns out that they lined up, introduced themselves, but the artist was not impressed. And then one said: ‘We also have an Olympic shot-put champion. She feels ill, she stayed on the bus…’ Picasso stopped him by raising his hands: ‘Bring her to me quickly! I have never seen an Olympic champion! ’ They took me into the courtyard of a random house. Picasso: small, quick. He looked at me for a long time. Finally he asked: ‘Aren’t you going to give a shot-put demonstration?’ ‘I don’t have it with me. Isn’t there half a brick somewhere?’ A man who was helping him work the clay handed him a brick. I lifted my tight skirt in the French manner and threw the brick far over the wall. Picasso applauded: ‘How beautiful! It’s a technique worthy of a ballet.’ He touched my hand and repeated: ‘Yes, it’s beautiful…’ As a farewell he gave me a vase with his brand on it.
Born in Leningrad in 1931, a child at the time of the city’s siege during World War II, Zybina sawed firewood straight, as her father, a soldier, had taught her by hitting her from the age of five, and survived the school diet of a glass of milk, 125 grams of bread for the whole family and kohlrabi broth. As an athlete, always in dispute with the Stalinist leaders of Soviet sport, she broke the world shot-put record five times between 1952 (15.19m) and 1956 (16.76m). She lost it to the Soviet Ukrainian Tamara Press, trained like her by Viktor Alekseyev, who raised it to 18.59 metres in 1965. “It was a scandal. Tamara and Irina, her sister, were hermaphrodites.” [condición intersexual que les hacía producir testosterona como hombres] “Tamara, it’s not your fault you were born like that. We don’t blame you,” Zybina said in the same interview. “‘Tamara, it’s not your fault you were born like that. We don’t blame you,’ I told her when I reported her case at a meeting. ‘Who do we blame? Them, them, the leaders.’ And I told them: ‘I understand that you cling to medals, but in sport everyone should be on equal terms. Behind every victory there is a huge amount of hard work.”
Zybina, married to the commander of the cruiser-museum Aurora, the ship that started the 1917 Revolution in what was then Petrograd, was sanctioned and excluded for a time from the Soviet team, with which she participated in four Games. She won gold in 1952; silver in Melbourne 56, seventh in Rome 60 after becoming a mother, and bronze in Tokyo 64. “And being the second best Soviet, my own coach excluded me from the team for Mexico 68. It would have been my fifth Games.”
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