Rafa Nadal or Carolina Marín would never have come to anything with Minister Celaá

Rafa Nadal he confessed it to Bertin Osborne in the program ‘My house is yours’: “The training sessions were intense. My uncle pressed me both on a tennis and emotional level. I had a difficult time because I tightened the rope and sometimes I tightened it too much, but I endured all that I had to endure. “His uncle was and is Toni NadalCoach of the Mallorcan player for 27 years, in which Rafa won 75 titles thanks to a demanding preparation in which what he did was so important as what he had to give up doing.

However, according to the Minister of Education and Vocational Training, Isabel CelaáWith the educational reform approved by the Government it is intended “that no one can be left behind, because a country needs everyone’s talent.” And for this it has given the green light to the autonomous communities so that allow students to pass the course without limit of failures. Quite a contradiction in education, except, of course, that education is understood to indoctrinate (even more) society, since talent can never be exempt from work and effort. It was explained by an NBA legend as Larry Bird: “It’s funny, the more we train, the luckier we get.”

High performance sports technicians know a lot about this, where you get there thanks to talent, but only those who add to it remain. Values ​​in disuse due to subsidization, such as compromise or sacrifice. Along with some more or less innate aptitudes, but that should not stop being developed, some attitudes that are available to anyone, although logically costly, are essential. We talk about the so-called culture of effort, in which, as concluded Howard GardnerAs a psychologist, researcher and professor at Harvard University, there is no one brilliant who does not have many hours of work behind him.

“Carolina’s success is exceptional because many of those who have succeeded in our country have done so in sports that are very popular in the West. However, what she has achieved is to be number 1 in a sport that is extremely popular in Asia. “These statements by Rafa Nadal, the best Spanish athlete in history, serve to crown his female version, Carolina Marin, the only badminton player three times world champion, in addition to an Olympian and four from Europe. And the fact is that if Rafa and Caro have something in common, in addition to their successes, it is the enormous work and effort they have had to do to get them.

If five years ago Carolina had no qualms about thanking Nadal for “letting” her meet him, now it is the tennis player who discovers himself before his compatriot in ‘Carolina Marín, I can because I think I can’, the series of Amazon Prime Video which premiered on October 9 and, although Minister Celaá may not like it, it is highly recommended. Already in 2014, just when he began his meteoric career to stardom, Carolina publicly said that “for me Rafa is an example to follow. We both have the same competitive character. He fights for all the balls, I for all the shuttlecocks, and until we do not see ourselves dead we do not take anything for lost “.

But among the many parallels that exist between these two athletes, there is one especially important, such as their respective coaches, the aforementioned Toni Nadal and Fernando Rivas. The first one tells that “after winning the first Roland Garros (2005), I left a letter to Rafael in his hotel room in which he explained all the things he had done wrong during the tournament and I made him a list with all the players Spaniards who had won a Grand Slam, asking him if he wanted to be better than them or was he already satisfied “. “I knew what Rafael wanted in tennis, so the only way to prepare it was to toughen it up.”, explains the Mallorcan coach.

“I believe little in innate talents”

Just as ‘Uncle Toni’ admits that “sometimes I made his life very difficult”, in ‘Carolina Marín, I can because I think I can’ we meet a Fernando Rivas who does practically the same with his pupil, whom he began training at the CAR in Madrid at the age of 14 and has already been with her for 12, something , as the player herself confesses, it has meant “many fights” for them. The documentary shows in the first person the hardness of winning everything. Caro’s sacrifice and loss of childhood and adolescence to achieve a goal that she wore herself when she was a child. “I want to be the best at everything,” she told her coach. And he achieve it.

“I believe little in innate talents,” says Rivas. “Carolina is who she is because of her ability to work and the hours she accumulates. His is not talent, but rather an amazing ability to work and renounce many things, “adds the Granada-born man.” He organized much longer training sessions than usual, forced him to train with bad balls on very adverse courts, “confessed Toni Nadal. in an interview with the Swiss newspaper ‘Blick’. “The truth is that he was the best student I could imagine. His predisposition to learn was brutal and he always understood toughness and demand as a means to an end. A player must do things because he is convinced of them, not because he is forced to, “explains the Mallorcan.

“Life is not just fun”

According to Toni, “a coach must know when to be demanding and when to hold back. When Rafael has gone through difficult times or has doubted himself, I always sought to give him motivation, encouragement and try to strengthen him. But when things go well, always I asked him for something else. We live in a world where people just want to have fun, even when they are training, but life is not just fun.. Most get frustrated when things are not going well and they are unwilling to change their habits. Whoever needs to be praised is never going to get better. “

In ‘Carolina Marín: I can because I think I can’ you see everything that the former coach of Nadal says, as his colleague Fernando Rivas puts it into practice, a true benchmark of world badminton and a treasure for the Spanish federation of this sport. Not in vain is it a story about sacrifice, which teaches what is behind sports success and fame. “Carolina and athletes like her do not have time to have an ordinary life,” says her coach. A requirement accepted and valued by the athlete, which has helped her to get where she has come and to return as she has returned after a serious injury.

At the maximum level of tension between player and coach, everything changes in a cathartic chat that both have with the witness cameras. A real conversation that serves to reach a point of convergence. As noted in the reviews of the series, the ‘bad’ Fernando Rivas explains to the ‘long-suffering’ Carolina Marín that “if you become a normal person, you stop doing extraordinary things”. The most normal things that, having set the goal of being the best player in badminton history, cannot be allowed. “I have no intention of controlling your personal life, but my job is to make you reflect on what your free time can cost you,” Fernando tells Carolina.

Precisely because of this maximum demand in her day to day life, the Huelva-born woman recognizes throughout the Amazon documentary that “I tell friends with the fingers of one hand and I have too many. I have very few.” Just as you accept that “I have missed many things, I know, but it has been worth it, because I have had all the rewards that I dreamed of as a child”. Another lesson in humility, in addition to a great capacity for suffering, indispensable in the culture of effort.

Fortunately, the Ministry of Education is no longer also the Ministry of Culture and Sports, since I am sure that Minister Celaá would not find the examples of Rafa Nadal and Carolina Marín convenient in his ridiculous approach that “no one is left behind” and for this, those who fail are rewarded. And let’s not say the methods used by their respective coaches and trainers. As Fernando Rivas says to his pupils at the CAR in Madrid, “think that while you are not training, there is a Chinese who is training.” Apply it to the study and you will understand that the Celaá Law will not only not make young Spaniards competitive, but that, unless they make an effort and pass, it will turn them into incompetent well-off.