The Spanish player Anna Cruz he also admitted to having been abused by the former basketball coach Lucas Mondelo, whose “continued psychological abuse”, which, especially at the rally last November, made him say “enough” and leave the national team in January. “It is very difficult to reach the elite and it is very hard to have to leave because a person makes your life impossible, but you do it to save your health. His continued psychological abuse caused me stress, anxiety, depression … It led me to leave the national team and go through a very difficult process “, stresses Cruz in an interview published this Thursday by ‘The country’. The Catalan thus joins the complaint of his partner Marta Xargay, who in the same newspaper acknowledged the pressure to which the coach was subjected with his weight and that made him suffer episodes of bulimia and also leave basketball.
Per Cruz, the pressure of the weight used it mondelo al Kursk Russian as “strategy and harassment, not medical control” and that with this deal “has sunk many players.” “It didn’t catch me there, but it diminished me in other ways,” admitted the winger, adding that “the demand for elite sports cannot destroy the rest of the values” and that ” not everything is worth winning and winning cannot justify everything ». “You have to normalize saying enough, not always swallowing. It’s not worth everything. Hopefully no partner will ever experience this deal again. We love to compete and overlook intolerable things. Medals and titles don’t have to be so expensive, ”he says.
Cruz remember that the selection group was “very close too” against the selector. “We all suffered and became strong among ourselves, but over time, he consolidated this need for conflict to develop his tenure and began to foster unhealthy competition within the team,” he says. The Catalan does not hide that having to “obey someone who makes your life impossible is very hard mentally” and that if they did not laugh “thank you” to the technician, he considered the person involved as “problematic”. “This is still a job and these practices are workplace harassment,” he adds. But the hardest for Cruz, a key player in the successful cycle of the national team, arrived at the rally last November in Valencia. “I needed psychological help to overcome the panic of going to training in those days,” warned the player, who had publicly shown both her support for Girona’s Marta Xargay when she announced that she was leaving and her criticism of Lucas Mondelo. “The disrespect, personal and professional that I suffered in that concentration was very hard. I went from filling the void to disqualifying even issues of my private life. The anxiety attacks I suffered in those days led me to say enough. I couldn’t stand all that shit anymore, “he said.
In January he left the national team with a letter stating that “the family” was not treated “like this” and not being able to “continue to tolerate acts” that went against his “principles”, although he did not quote in any moment a mondelo. “I couldn’t even turn on the TV, it hurt to see them. We weren’t there for extra-sporting reasons, it’s been many years and many things we’ve lived together. Many beautiful and difficult moments “, sentence Cruz about whether he was able to see the team at the Eurobasket and in the Games. Last Tuesday, the coach was sacked as women’s national team coach after falling in the quarterfinals. Tokyo 2020.
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