In the sport’s elite you have to train and train | Villanueva del Fresno

Elite athlete Margarita Montes is the director of the Villanueva del Fresno municipal judo academy, where she trains fifty young judokas. He began to compete in 1989 in the Spanish Judo Championship in Cáceres, today he holds 25 titles between world, European and national championships in different combat sports, including sambo wrestling, grappling, jiu-jitsu, women’s wrestling, beach wrestling and judo. Her last World Cup was her in the beach wrestling modality in Antalya (Turkey) where she became world champion in 2007, after overcoming a herniated disc that kept her retired for five years. She is a national judo coach, as well as all the Olympic wrestling mentioned for which she holds a black belt in various dans.

She was a Spanish pioneer in Lithuania by competing in Olympic wrestling, where only men competed.

Margarita was born in 1972 in Cáceres, she is the tenth (twin of a boy) of a large family of 12 children. When she was two years old, her mother became a widow, having to emigrate to Madrid. She has never lost contact with Cáceres where several of her siblings reside.

Competed in Olympic freestyle wrestling in Lithuania when only men did

pioneer

She put on her first kimono at the age of 10 when she snuck into her brothers’ judo class (which they didn’t go to because they switched to soccer). When he had to pay for the classes, the teacher informed his mother that he didn’t really do ballet but judo and since then he hasn’t taken off his kimono again.

His great fight was against the scale since the competition requires an exact weight. For sport she has sacrificed boyfriends, family events and parties, such as New Year’s Eve where she only ate the grapes or weddings where she went with her salad, but the worst of all was not being able to drink so as not to gain weight.

Every day, on vacation or at the High Performance Center, he trained for six hours: running, swimming, weights and the fights in which he competed. On his vacations he has always carried two suitcases, one for running clothes and the normal one for dressing.

He has competed in so many countries that he has lost count, although England, Bologna, Belgium, Turkey or Germany stand out. Sometimes two championships coincided with him and when he got off one plane he had to get on another.

He defines as “impressive” listening to the anthem of Spain from the first position of the podium. “It is something that cannot be explained, it is a reward for so much sacrifice.” For her, other awards are the great values ​​that she has acquired such as discipline or being better people.

At the 1994 World Sambo Championship, she met her husband, Pedro García, also an elite athlete, -sixth dan judo black belt, runner-up in Spain in judo, Spanish jiu-jitsu champion and world champion in sambo– with whom he began to travel to compete for the national team.

As a high-level international athlete, she was awarded a scholarship by the Program of the Olympic Sports Association (ADO).

Of his entire career, the championship that cost him the most was the first wrestling championship, as he lacked grip in his clothing, and the most painful were the two injuries, one to the tendons and the other to the meniscus, that he has had.

She stopped competing in 2010 due to motherhood, but continues to train for a couple of hours every day. Her two children have been doing judo since they were very young and she does not rule out that they also compete.

Silver medal

He has received the silver medal for sports merit from Castilla La Mancha, where he had an academy in Pastrana (Guadalajara) for 19 years. When she was world champion in sambo for the second time, she was received by the King and Queen of Spain together with her husband, as the best athletes in the federation.

Her eyes light up when the world of competition is mentioned, which she misses, because she would continue to compete, there is even a veterans’ wrestling championship that she would love to go to, but she has no people to train with and without training does not compete.