While in Paris, with its sad skies from March to July, the Olympic celebration grows under the rain, in Palencia Mariano Haro, the athlete we all wanted to be, dies at the age of 84. A genius from the poor plateau of the 40s, with more schooling in the street and in the mountains than in the classroom, who says one day, at a reception for Cela, “Don Camilo, I wish I could write like you.” And the Nobel Prize winner answers, “Mariano, the truly difficult thing is to run like you, I wish I could, I wish I could.”
And everyone would like it, the very knowledgeable spectators of Oslo, the Bislett stadium, where fans who have been fed long-distance athletics with more eagerness than mother’s milk, and who have applauded Emil Zátopek, Ron Clarke, the greatest, begin to shout in chorus, excited, Ha-ro! Ha-ro! Ha-ro! It is August 5, 1970. 10,000m. Inevitably, it was raining in the Norwegian capital. The rival is Frank Shorter, the American who two years later would be Olympic marathon champion in Munich. In the straight of each of the 25 laps, Haro, the boy who hunted partridges by hand on the moors of Becerril de Campos, changes pace ferociously. A blow that only Shorter could resist and that the stadium appreciated and encouraged. As almost always, Haro did not win. Like the four times he finished second in the World Cross Country Championships, Cambridge, Monza, Waregem, Rabat, from 1972 to 1975. He always ran faster than anyone else, there was always someone faster than him in the final metres. Like when he finished fourth in the 10,000 metres in Munich 1972, with a national record of 27m 48.14s, a time that even today, 52 summers later, would make him one of the best in Spain, after an epic battle with Lasse Virén, Emiel Puttemans, Miruts Yifter and Frank Shorter, too, who this time he was able to beat. The best of the decade. Athletes who marked an era. Virén won, a Finnish postman who only appeared in the major championships, who broke the world record after falling and coming back. Years later, Haro, who had tried to prepare himself by training at altitude, going up to 3,000m in Colombia with his coach, Gerardo Cisneros, read in the newspapers that Virén had resorted to autologous blood transfusions, then permitted, to increase his haemoglobin and improve his performance. “I am not surprised that there was something strange. I always beat him in the minor races, but in the championships he was unbeatable,” lamented Haro of Virén, double Olympic champion of 5,000m and 10,000m both in Munich and in Montreal 76, where Haro, at 36 years old, was sixth in the 10,000m. “He was running on super petrol. I only prepared myself with chorizo, my mother’s stews, and wine.” This is how Alberto Calleja, his friend from Palencia and biographer, remembers him.
Haro was everything in the Spanish cross-country. Wearing the shirt of Educación y Descanso de Palencia, a club that he turned, together with his brother Pepe, Cándido Alario and Santiago de la Parte, into the best in Europe, he was Spanish cross-country champion from 1971 to 1977, twice winner of the Lasarte International Cross-Country in 1974 and 1975 and national record holder in all distances, from 1,500 metres to 20km and one hour.
Everyone mourns Haro. They are sad, as if the passing of time only allowed them to wait for bad news, all the athletes of his time, Javier Álvarez Salgado or Jorge González Amo, pioneers of Spanish athletics, who remember their magical trips to the Scandinavian summer of Volodalen, where they shared cabins in the forest, next to its lake, discovered love and freedom, and ran along its paths with the best long-distance runners in the world of the time. Then they discovered true athletics in the rallies in Oslo or Stockholm, the Swedish capital where, on August 15, 1966, Haro won the 5,000m with a time of 13m 53.8s, a few tenths of a second off the national record of that time, held by Francisco Aritmendi. The Olympic stadium in Stockholm, like the Bislett years later, acclaims him. His legend and his anecdotes have fueled the dreams of the youngest. “We have to remember him with laughter. He was a great guy,” says González Amo, who can’t help but laugh when he remembers the story that Haro told him, how, on the morning of a meeting in Algiers, he saw his false teeth on the bedside table in an empty glass, dry. “Damn! I thought I had left them with water,” said the man from Palencia, and the Asturian sprinter Melanio Asensio, who shared a room with him, felt so sick that he had to run to the bathroom.
It was natural intelligence. He worked as a janitor in the building of the Sindicatos (Franco’s vertical union) in Palencia and when he travelled he never forgot to send a postcard to his boss, who was not at all pleased to read in the press some statements made by the athlete from Mexico, when he was in the pre-Olympic competition in 1967. A local journalist had seen him gesticulating animatedly with some Soviet athletes, among them Dudin, the 3,000m steeplechase runner, and asked him if he spoke Russian. Haro, who was dealing with the Russians in the sale and purchase of solid-state cameras, replied that of course he did, and he acted as an interpreter, inventing, of course, all the answers, since he had no idea. Grateful, the journalist ended up interviewing him. “Do you work, Don Mariano?” he asked. And Haro, sarcastically, replied: “No, no, I am in Sindicatos.” And she arrived in Mexico 68 with her suitcase full of Spanish mantillas to sell to other athletes. Her best sales representatives were the cleaning ladies, who every morning asked her for more fabric, since they were taken from the hands of athletes from all countries.
Haro was picaresque and fantasy. The struggle for survival, which was everyone’s life, was turned into an art and into something more, into a springboard. “He was the Lazarillo de Tormes of athletics,” Calleja describes him. “With hardly any knowledge of reading or writing, but with a unique art for life, he conquered the world and became mayor of his town, Becerril de Campos, between 1979 and 1983, with democracy. He was the intelligence of life.” He was born in Valladolid by chance, to a mother who worked in the service of a family and a father who was a bricklayer, a master in the art of laying bricks to make perfect vaults in the cellars and a lover of foot races.
With Jakob Ingebrigtsen, the best middle-distance athlete of the decade, he shares in his biography a childhood of running. The man from Palencia, from a very young age, running on foot every day for kilometres and kilometres through the moors of Tierra de Campos, hunting rabbits with his dog, challenging the train to Palencia, which like the one to Santa Marta, whistles more than it goes, taking food to his father, another runner, who built brick by brick wine vats in the wineries of the villages around Becerril de Campos. The life of a child in Castile in the 40s and 50s was hard. The Norwegian, from the age of three, running after his older brothers in the snow and around the lake of Stavanger, a well-off small bourgeoisie, and his father, boss and trainer, with a whistle, methodical, directing and training, and demanding. Their childhood, the kilometres of running, the workload they subjected their bodies to, made them champions.
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