Jordan Diaz is where everyone wanted him to be, where he wanted to be, in the final of the Olympic Games; how he wanted to be, tension and stress, a certain anxiety, the weight of dreams, threatening his Caribbean calm. The qualification, apparently a formality (a single jump and good luck for others), it taught him the difference between the Olympic Games and all other competitions. And it tested the strength of his body and soul.
There is a mystique in the half hour before a triple jump, routines, tests, talks, walks, visualizations, a flowa vibe that allows Jordan Díaz to enter into a trance that is suddenly interrupted by the notes of the Spanish anthem, a slow, endless version, that resound in the Stade de France when Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., vice president of the IOC, and Raúl Chapado, vice president of the International Athletics Federation, hang a gold medal and a piece of iron from the Eiffel Tower around the necks of María Pérez and Álvaro Martín, who embrace each other fraternally at the top of the podium. On the other side of the stadium, the Spanish kangaroo interrupts his heeling run and stands firm, showy tapingwhite on his right knee, to listen respectfully. It is not that the exit from the bubble affects him greatly, nor the nerves that he confesses to being the favorite debutant or even being the first to act in the qualification.
The Spanish athlete with the best chance of becoming Olympic champion after the race walkers must jump at least 17.10m to be in the final (Friday, 20.15). He jumps 17.24m.
A formality for someone who arrives in Paris with the third best time of all time, almost a metre more, 18.18m, which gave him gold at the European Championships in Rome. Good entry speed (10.6 metres per second), good jump (6.25m), moderate step (5.14m) and a third without forcing (5.85m). “My first jump at the Games, ufff,” says the athlete born in Havana 23 years ago. “The pressure I was under when I went out on the track was incredible, and it was a bit difficult for me to let go because I hadn’t warmed up enough. When I finished jumping, the pressure went down. I knew I had jumped more than 17, but I had to see it there because 17.10m is an important mark. And when I got to 17.24m, all the pressure I was under went down and that was it. But the objective was this, to go to the final with one jump, and that was it.”
As in Rome, where he turned the triple jump final into a duel of honour, the Portuguese Pedro Pablo Pichardo, the old (31 years old) Olympic champion of a specialty in which young people born in the century take on the world, was determined to jump higher than his compatriot of origin. With an attempt that he celebrates with his usual pose of superior indifference, leaving it there, as if it were not important, Pichardo jumped 17.44m. The other veteran, the engineer from Burkina Faso Hughes Fabrice Zango, 31 years old, the world champion from Budapest trained by Teddy Tamgho, a Frenchman of Cameroonian origin who speaks Spanish with a Cuban accent and is from the school of Iván Pedroso, Jordan Díaz’s trainer – the relationships in the triple jump elite would make for bubbling chapters of the series Tangles—jumped 17.16m. Both know how to win. They have a title that Jordan Diaz does not. And the young people who are still deprived, are coming on strong, like Salif Mane, recent US collegiate and national champion, who jumped 17.16m. And the sensation Jaydon Hibbert, the Jamaican version, and a little younger, 19 years old, of the flow and Díaz’s brush, stayed at 16.99m, but was considered the sixth best of all those who tried it.
“It will be difficult to win a medal, it will be difficult,” the athlete from Havana cools the medal-winning optimism, even though the first impression, so often false, gives him an advantage. “It’s the Olympic Games, each athlete is going to give 100% for the medal. They all have great marks, they are all at a great level.”
The young people who arrive are irreverent, carefree, when they start competing and surprise themselves almost more than the world, and can, like Hibbert, the Jamaican who reaches dizzying speeds with short races, describe the experience as a triplysergic to Nigerian music, an out-of-body experience. “I honestly don’t know how I do it,” Hibby tries to explain, her extroverted self running up against the wall of Olympic pressure, with all of Jamaica watching. “I just let my body do it. I don’t know how I felt. I don’t try to know how you feel. I don’t want to go into the next competition and screw up, and overthink it.”
The triple jump is an ineffable experience, and Hibby’s words would be endorsed by all athletes, and knowing in an Olympic final to let the body do what it has to dohop, step, jump, Converting the physical violence of the impact on the ground, 15 times its own weight, into a gentle impulse, flying, stepping on the moon, floating, will be the key that decides a title that Spanish athletics cherishes.
You can follow Morning Express Sports onFacebook andXor sign up here to receive theDaily newsletter of the Paris Olympic Games.
