Maialen chourraut never fails: a silver hangs, his third medal, the third of Spain

"Mua, Mua", sent kisses to his coach and husband Xabi Etxaniz and his stepson and celebrated Maialen Chourraut, and a tradition in all games, after hanging on a silver, the third medal of his life and the third medal of Spain in Tokyo . He knew that the podium was his, but when he left in the final soon, very soon, he had to wait and there he was for half an hour, under a small white tent, in the shade of the infernal sun that falls on the Kasai channel.

I saw how most of their rivals went to pale and almost all had just rumbled, dizzy by the violence of Japanese waters, more bravase than ever. The reaction of it, calm. Until the medal came. There she decomposed. "I do not believe it, I do not believe it." She only managed to overcome the German Ricarda Funk, but she was not disgust either. After all, he just a year ago, or even a few months ago, another medal seemed an impossible. Never Chourraut had spent an Olympic cycle like that, so raw, the payment for the efforts of the previous years. She started at the beginning, for the return of her from Rio, and she ended up doing anything.

"It has cost a lot to get here," he recognized as a first reaction Xabi Etxaniz, husband and coach, and narrated, for example, the noise listened to just the day they entered home after the 2016 games. With gold to the neck, CLAC! For days and days Maialen Chourraut was stuck, his back still, for the tension of the competition, for the fatigue of the workouts, by the nerves of being so long before the chambers. That was only the first indication of a five-year periplone full of pain, doubts, changes and finally joys.

At 38, more with the parion because of the pandemic, there were days when he thought about leaving it, but a champion can not leave defeated by his own body. She sought solution to her back pain, then to her continuous dizziness and later the fissures of her in her ribs and in early 2021 she sat down prepared. There was also a difficult change of piragua and a move back to San Sebastian, but nothing matters. "Mua, Mua", she launches kurraut kisses with another medal, a tradition in games.