Vicente Ardines has a gym in Lugones (Siero) that his parents opened “many years ago” and where they have always practiced martial arts, especially judo. But one day Ardines discovered kenpo and everything changed. The one from Lugones is currently the national coach of kenpo, a discipline associated with the Karate Federation, and in the two years he has been there he has led the Spanish team to win the World Championship twice despite having much less media than its rivals. The last of those championships was achieved a few days ago in Hammamet (Tunisia).
The Siero City Council received its illustrious neighbor and the mayor, Ángel García, described Ardines as “the Luis Enrique of kenpo”. Ardines, for his part, thanked the attention and explained the difficulties that a minority sport like his goes through: “We are a minority sport, that is why we take so few people; the achievement is that Spain, with eleven people, who they are very chosen, because in Spain the level is very high, they managed to beat other teams that took a lot more people”. To achieve this they had to multiply: “We enrolled those eleven people in 44 categories, which is the only way to qualify for the gold medal of the traditional kenpo world championship.”
The national coach explained that he has been “with the subject of kenpo all his life” and that he knows “almost everyone”, which makes his job as a coach easier. The figures for this sport further highlight the gold achieved by Vicente Ardines’ team: “We have some 5,600 federated members, a small number and the economic contribution is small and it goes away right away”. In Asturias, Ardines explained, “there will be about 130 people, especially in the Lugones gym and in schools”
One of the anecdotes that Ardines can tell from his gym in Lugones is when Vladimir Putin, current president of Russia, a country now at war with Ukraine after trying to invade it, passed through Asturias with the Russian judo team, when the European Championships were held. that discipline in Oviedo, in 1998: “It coincided that he was in the gym when the Judo European Championship was held, he was the coach of the Russian Judo Federation, he stayed in a hotel in Lugones and they looked for a place to train in Lugones”.
The coach also related how he learned about this martial art: “I used to do judo, one day a person came in to train, he put on the black suit, which is the one we wear in kenpo, I saw him doing that, he was a man who was a policeman, I started to train and I was with him for two years. I loved it, I saw it so natural, aesthetically so beautiful”, says Ardines. A discipline that, he assures, “is the Ferrari of self-defense”: “People want to sell self-defense and we have the Ferrari of self-defense,” he concluded.
