The long pedestrian promenade of Colombes, between low houses and pastry shops, makes it clear that this town north-west of Paris is not just any Olympic venue to please the outskirts of the capital. The historic posters bear the sporting memory of its local temple, the Yves-du-Manoir stadium, which hosted the final of the 1938 World Cup, and the Opening Ceremony and athletics of the 1924 Games. The old metal roof of the main stand still retains its straight, flat shape. It was there that the men’s team scored a big upset in the quarter-finals against Belgium (3-2) on Sunday and the women’s team will be looking to do the same against the same country on Monday (8pm, TVE and Eurosport). They have not reached the semi-finals since Sydney 2000.
Lola Riera (Valencia, 33 years old) no longer thought she would be here. Former coach Adrian Lock had left her out of his plans and she had left in 2022 for the Dutch League because she needed a change of scenery. But after a year and a half of living with the “proud and superb” hockey orangethe new coach, Carlos García Cuenca, asked her if she still wanted to return. “This is a very hard process, you train every day, you have to want to be here. If you play with the national team, the holidays are only seven or ten days. But we have also experienced things that other people from other fields have not experienced,” she says. She answered yes.
Her expertise in taking penalties and penalty corners continued to make her indispensable in the eyes of the new Redsticks coach. A specialisation that “has opened doors” for her, and has required a relentless discipline and also a bit of imagination. “I focused on javelin throwing because of the hip movement. Because what we do is fixate one foot and rotate the hip a lot. My coach even told me to play bowling because we also have to bend down. You look for things in other places that help you. This is a technique, but it is not universal. It has required many hours of work alone with my coach. It is hard to get the hang of it,” she says.
A penalty of his in a shoot outexecuted with Vaseline, became famous in the world. “I have done it twice. When we won the 2016 League with Sanse Complutense, when we were playing for it, and in the 2018 World Cup. If you fail, you are exposed, but I had it well practiced. In Paris I hope not to have to use it,” says this medical student.
The next Olympic stage for the national team is the quarterfinals against Belgium, a tough opponent for a Spanish hockey team that is going with what it has. The veteran Riera has had time to compare what there is in Spain and what she has seen abroad. “In our club [Sanse Complutense, de Madrid]“The Division of Honor teams train on half a field,” she warns. “That takes away a lot of quality. The women’s team is in one part and the men’s in the other, at the same time. During the week, we only have the full field for half an hour, which they haven’t even arrived yet. There are Catalan clubs with more fields, but not ours. Then in Holland, where I played for a year and a half, there are some with seven fields,” explains this player with 210 international matches and three Olympics.
Having achieved the minimum objective of the quarterfinals, which is key to the distribution of subsidies from the High Council of Sports, the women’s team is aiming for the same amount as the men’s. And after the Games, Riera will see what she does with the national team. After Tokyo, she had decided to continue on to Paris and was cut. And when she was already out, she was brought back. At Christmas, in view of her return to the Redsticks, she left the Dutch team and also returned to the League.
In our club we train in the middle of the field and the boys in the other half.
“Every week, I came to Madrid or Barcelona to train with the national team from Holland. I was in Spain from Monday to Wednesday, and there from Thursday to Sunday. It was very hard. They let me do it because in these sports, the national teams are given a lot of priority. It took me seven hours from my front door to training in Spain. One hour to Amsterdam, wait at the airport, flight, get to the training camp… In fact, I came on Sunday because if I did it on Monday I wouldn’t have time. I was always tired. In the pre-Olympic, which was the first competition, I was pretty much at my limit,” recalls Lola Riera.
But it worked out well for him. This Saturday, in the group stage finale against Australia (a 3-1 defeat), as soon as the referee blew the whistle for the penalty, the coach brought his great specialist off the bench. He came on and equalised. It was his third goal in the Games and the 80th in his career with Spain. Nobody in the Paris team has scored more in the Games or overall.
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