Perhaps to give a special dimension to his routine practice, the great Robert Korzeniowski spoke of the mystique of walking, of the constant need of the athlete to keep one foot on the ground, of his different contact with nature, and many walkers, like Yohan Diniz, felt it that way, a certain madness, like the four-time Olympic champion, and they talked about it.
Paul McGrath is not one of them. “I do race walking because I like to win,” says the Catalan athlete (22 years old, Gavà, Barcelona). “Mysticism? No. I give race walking the value that an athlete can give to the sport he loves, the value that a tennis player gives to tennis, sacrifice, dedication.” He says that since he and his two younger sisters never sat still at home, his mother signed them up for an extracurricular sporting activity. He wanted football but there was no women’s team and so that the three of them could be together he chose athletics, the only sport in which men and women train together, at the same time, sharing sessions and coaches, and that is how the track is there, in Cornellà, on the hot afternoon in May, the day of the Corpus Christi holiday, when the photos and interviews are taken. Dozens of young people from the Cornellà Athletic Club training. Long-distance runners, hurdlers, jumpers, such as Jaime Guerra, Spanish long-distance champion (8.17m), and race walkers, and McGrath shares the same training as the phenomenal youngster Sofía Santacreu. “I did athletics and I didn’t win many events and it was funny because when I did my first race walking I came fifth, and when I was nine I said: ‘if I come fifth without training or anything in a difficult event, if the following year I try to get some lessons on technique and such, then let’s see how it goes’. And when I was 10 years old I became champion of Catalonia.”
Perhaps McGrath is an understatement when he says he likes to win. Rather, he hates not winning. “In long distance races everything is very mental, very psychological,” he says. “Having gone through many hardships on my own without any kind of help has made me, little by little, able to say no to that inner demon that suddenly pops into your head and says: ‘Hey, let it go, there’s no need to go any further, third place is fine. ’ It’s still there, but I fight it and I can make those intrusive thoughts disappear, the worst ones there can be.”
He doesn’t have a psychologist, but a 45-minute talk with Imanol Ibarrondo, the coachmental figures. “He gave me advice and a book to read and write down my thoughts every night, and I’m doing my homework,” she says. “He’s very busy, to another levelwith soccer players, in San Diego, but he attended to me even though he didn’t have a budget. And he gave me his book. He is a wise man who had a great impact on me.”
Nothing new, apparently. What champion doesn’t care about winning? After all, in the world of athletics everyone tells the same story: if you are very good at school, very fast, very skillful, you play football; if you are only good at running, you go to athletics, and there, the same ladder: the best, sprinters, then the middle-distance runners and the long-distance runners, and finally, the walkers. And these adorn their condemnation with epic, images of athletes physically destroyed after having walked 20 kilometres in less than 80 minutes. The living image of effort, of suffering. “Let’s see,” explains McGrath, more than 1.80 metres tall, who was annoyed at first to grow so much, because he thought it would be bad for walking, but then he saw that the profile had changed, that the Swede Karlström, the one who beat him in Rome, is two bodies taller than him, that Álvaro Martín is the same height, and he calmed down. “For the Instagram photo, it looks good to be there, destroyed, exhausted. But no, I don’t like it. The truth is that I try to put on my anti-wrinkle creams and sunscreen and such so I don’t look like I’m 40 years old when I’m done.”
But this is not the case for McGrath, with deep green eyes, emeralds of naivety in his dark complexion, who could have competed as an Irishman, but decided to choose Spain, the most complicated route to success as a race walker, the most difficult path, so dense is the history and reality of Spanish race walking. “We are the Kenya or the Ethiopia of race walking,” he says. So bold and so confident is the Catalan with an Irish surname who studies Journalism at Pompeu. García Bragado, Llopart, Marín, Massana, Miguel Ángel López, before. Álvaro Martín and María Pérez, double world champions, now. And it is so difficult to even make the Olympic team in Paris with the disappearance of the long distance, the 50 kilometres so long for television, replaced by a mixed relay of 42 in four relays. “You know that to be the best in the world you have to beat the best Spaniards. And I knew that from my first international competition. My grandparents are Irish, and so is my father, who met my mother when they were both working in Glasgow and she told him that if he wanted something more than a romance in Scotland he had to go with her to Barcelona. He came for love in 1992 and from that love I was born 10 years later. It was the best decision of his life. He misses Celtic but always has Van Morrison on the record player reminding him of his misty days. If he had chosen Irish nationality, from the age of 15 he would have gone to all the international tournaments possible. And certainly to the World Cup in Budapest. But I already knew when I was 15, 16 that if I qualified with Spain for any international championship it meant I was going to do well. Because just the struggle to get into one of those two or three places is greater than any other country. And it is the same as for the Games. For the Games, imagine that Miguel Ángel López, world champion, has been left out.”
He admires the man from Llano de Brujas, Murcia, and was so excited when he saw him win the World Cup in Beijing as a child. He got goosebumps the day he shook hands with his idol, the Ecuadorian Jefferson Pérez, Olympic champion in Atlanta 96. “I’m a bit of a Jefferson fanatic, and I fulfilled a dream when I shook his hand at a World Cup and I was able to tell him how much I admired him.” He is also a race-walking geek and analyses videos of his training sessions for hours and hours in order to discover technical errors in his search for “excellence.” “Walking is cheap. With some outlet trainers and any old T-shirt, you can start. But to be in the elite you have to go up to a more technological level. I am making small investments to see if they have an effect on 1 August at 7.30 next to the Seine, between the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower. I have bought an ice vest,” he says. “And then I have a good nutrition plan. Every kilometre, water and then salts and gels. Carbohydrate gels are now essential. To go 1h 17m you have to put energy into the body all the time. Non-stop gels, drinks with salts… The last five kilometres, four kilometres, there the body does not want any carbohydrates, it does not want any gels, the stomach is closed, so we have to have a fairly good super-depot of carbohydrates for energy for those final kilometres.”
The training session is at 7pm because his coach, Alejandro Aragoneses, couldn’t do it before then. When the athlete was hesitating between throwing the javelin, because he had a good arm, and marching, his physical constitution sent him to marching. He can’t train before then because he needs to have a paid job – a technician in a recycling company – to be able to dedicate himself, almost as a volunteer, with hardly any financial reward, to polishing one of the greatest talents in Spanish athletics. “That’s how most of the coaches in Spain are with great Olympic athletes. I get a little from the club, but it wouldn’t be enough to live on. And then I have to use my own pocket to travel to competitions or training camps,” says Aragoneses, who visited his pupil a couple of times in May in Sierra Nevada and has used his holidays to be with him for three weeks in July in Font Romeu, fine-tuning his preparation. “My wife is also a coach and she understands it, but there will come a time, and not too late, when we will no longer be able to bear living like this, trained out of pure willpower and also because, of course, it makes you want to be the coach of an Olympian.”
If you are not a mystic and you are a bit allergic to epics, McGrath is in a way a mythomaniac, who has in his head the round number of 100 miles, 165 kilometres a week training at five minutes per kilometre. “I train in Gavà, where I have a whole path on the beach, I also have orchards, canals in the Delta… a splendid place, idyllic to do kilometres and kilometres and then on days of series I go to the Cornellà track here. 80% of the kilometres I do there. 140-150 a week,” he explains. “I have not yet reached 100 miles, I want to get there, I am close, but walking, which is slower than the runners, we go more or less at five minutes per kilometre, say, when the runners go at four, it takes hours, it takes many hours.” He trains alone, in his bubble, in his thoughts, and at most he accepts that a family member accompanies him on the bike, giving him a chat and water.
The boy who used to sulk and be unbearable when he didn’t win is now a mature young man. He won’t break down if he doesn’t win a medal in Paris, but he will always hate not winning.
You can follow Morning Express Sports onFacebook andXor sign up here to receiveour weekly newsletter.
