One of the biggest

It is very difficult to reach the elite of any sport, but it is even more difficult to leave it at the right time, not before or after, leaving in the air the ambiguous feeling that it may be too soon, but also the suspicion of that it might be too late to be too late. That Aimar Olaizola has made the right decision has all the logic in the world. And it is that very few pelotaris have managed the times as well as the forward of Goizueta, a mixture of artist and Swiss watchmaker during his 23 years as a professional.

His record is there, overwhelming. Unintentionally, they make you think of your mother looking for holes in the walls to put the txapelas and overwhelmed to shine the silver of so many trophies. From 2002 to 2020, 14 victories and 26 finals disputed between the Manomanista, the Cuatro y Medio and the Parejas. We are talking, without a doubt, of one of the greatest baseball players of all time and, together with Juan Martínez de Irujo, his great rival for so many years, the star of the ball in the 21st century. Both marked an era and became greater precisely from the enormous demand that marked their rivalry, as has happened in tennis with the ‘Big Three’.

They faced up to thirteen finals of the three main championships (7-6 in favor of Olaizola in the aggregate count) and filled the frontons for years with their charisma and talent. “Irujo, Aimar, Irujo, Aimar”, the echo of those songs still resounds in the crowded frontons. When the Ibero champion announced his premature retirement in 2016 it was inevitable to think that the ball was lame, as if he had lost one of the two legs of the bench. And that Aimar would suffer that strange feeling of emptiness, almost a kind of orphanhood, which causes the loss of your most faithful antagonist. At the end of the day, not only had they starred in historical duels but, following in the wake of Titin III, one of those geniuses who provoke an inevitable desire for emulation, they led the great revolution in the game that, especially in individual battles, he has lived the ball at hand in the last two decades. From the boat to the air, we could say, as a historian speaks of the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

A natural talent

Aimar Olaizola was a natural talent who took off thanks to an inordinate love for his sport. His older brother was also a pelotari and he spent the day at the fronton, something that in Goizueta is not surprising, considering that in that Navarrese town lost between mountains there are three for less than a thousand inhabitants. Their conditions were obvious. He had a left foot that seemed to have fallen from the sky as a blessing, the same one that Julián Retegui or Ladis Galarza received at birth, and he worked it day by day until he turned it into a deadly weapon.

This anthological left-hander has been one of the fundamental reasons why Aimar has been able to extend his career until he is 42 years old – he will retire on November 13, the day he meets them – being perfectly competitive. In fact, he is preparing to play the final of the CaixaBank Masters and recently assured that, accompanied by Zabaleta, he could continue for three or four more years. Nobody doubts it. It is enough to imagine the good balls that he would have at his disposal thanks to the power of a very dominating defender and the lethal effects of his hook, a dazzling blow, a prodigy of power and geometry.

Sensitivity

Aimar is going to go down in history as a very technical and cerebral player. There are objective reasons for considering it that way. In addition, it has always been very tempting to do it to contrast that image with that of Irujo, much more passionate and unleashed. A rivalry like his had to also be fed with a thesis and an antithesis. The coldness of Olaizola II, however, should be somewhat relativized. Just because he wasn’t seen retreating to the locker room kicking the door and fuming from his ears doesn’t mean he was an ice man. Aimar has been more sensitive on the court than he may have seemed and that weakness was shown in several finals in which his status as the favorite was indisputable. For example, those he lost in the Manomanista with Xala going 18-14 in favor or in 2015 with Urrutikoetxea, his friend and then an outstanding disciple. Not to mention the odd one in Couples. In reality, Aimar has only handled himself like a ruthless dictator in the Four and a Half, inside the ‘cage’, which during his best years was like the living room of his house.

The ‘Goizueta Scholarship’, as my colleague Tino Rey baptized him, will from now on begin a kind of farewell tour of all the great frontons, as Retegui II and Titín III did in their day – not so Juan Martínez de Irujo- until he ended up playing his last game in Goizueta, where it all began. Even to organize this trip to the seed in his farewell, Olaizola II has been accurate, who is already preparing to be a good father of a large family – he has four children, the last two twin girls – and continue to be linked to the ball, surely as a director Baiko technician, although yesterday nobody wanted to confirm it.