Juanjo Azpeitia started training Yago Lamela (1977-2014) reluctantly. Lamela was, at that time, thirteen years old. “I didn’t want to. I already had a very large group of athletes, and they had told me that The kid was a little wayward, he was going to his ball. But his father insisted a lot, he even called my wife, Margui. I accepted her because she asked me: “Juanjo, tell her yes, this can’t be anymore,” Azpeitia remembers.
Less than a decade later, at age twenty-one, Lamela made the jump that changed his life forever at the Maebashi World Cup: 8.56 meters, a European indoor record. Nobody expected it, not even his coach. “8.10, 8.20… but 8.56? It was impossible, impossible. A dream. Well, not even that: it was directly unimaginable. “I would have risked my life not to make a mark like that,” acknowledges his then coach. Even so, it was not enough to win: the Cuban surpassed him. Ivan Pedrosogreat dominator of the long jump of the time – he had already won two World Cups -, who pushed himself further than anyone had done in a World Cup: 8.62 meters.
That unforgettable March 7, 1999, Azpeitia followed the feat from Asturias: “Ramón Cid, national jumping manager, was telling me on the phone, and I was telling Yago’s parents and brother how it was going.. “We were all hallucinating, it was very exciting.” In the talk before his pupil left for Asia, she dispensed with the sensible guidelines and chose to focus on the earthly: “Iago,” she questioned him. Japan is the country of the rising sun, right? Well, we are going to show that, although it rains a lot in Avilés, we also know how to shine.”
Lamela arrived in Maebashi as a stranger. He left a celebrity: successful athlete, young, extremely handsome, with that physiognomy halfway between a Mick Jagger with springs in his legs and a supporting actor from “Out of Class.” At the height of excessive fame, the World Cup in Seville arrived. “In our hotel, there was security everywhere because people tried to sneak in to see it,” Azpeitia recalls. “We went to La Cartuja in a police car because otherwise it was impossible to get there.”
“All that the wine is a little big. Going from being a normal kid from Avilés to appearing in ‘Crónicas Marcianas’ is difficult to manage. To abstract himself from everything, he immersed himself in music, especially techno: he even composed songs with his organ. He was very simple, he didn’t like to attract attention,” says long-distance runner Bruno Toledo, who coincided with Lamela on the team from the University of Oviedo until sharing a room in the concentrations with Spain at World Cups and Europeans, and who defines the man from Aviles as a “force of nature.”He was very self-demanding, he dreamed big“he concludes.
From 2011 to 2014, Alfonso Cuervo was trained by Lamela. “He was an introverted person,” observes Cuervo, now converted into a jumper coach. From his coaching perspective, he considers Lamela “one of the greatest talents ever, a guy touched by a wand“. His jumping technique still amazes him. “He transformed the horizontal speed of the approach run into vertical in a very short time. He had a prodigious swing, he catapulted into the air and had a very clean way of entering the board.”
Although he obtained a generous medal table (a silver and a bronze in world championships, another silver and another bronze in indoor world championships and one more silver and a bronze in Europeans, all between 1999 and 2003), the hairless and withdrawn boy who took to the skies in Japan It would never exceed those 8.56 meters. “Why didn’t he achieve it? It can’t be explained. All athletes break records and then never surpass themselves again: Usain Bolt, Carl Lewis… everyone. Maybe they had something to do with it. lack of self-confidence and injuries“says Azpeitia, who would return to train Lamela in the final stretch of his career after the jumper decided to try his luck away from Asturias after the Sydney Olympic Games. “We couldn’t recover his best version. “He had many physical ailments and, in addition, he was depressed, as if bent,” laments the mentor of a young man who, a quarter of a century ago, “regained Spain’s faith in athletics” and to whomand a myocardial infarction took him heartbreakingly earlywhen he was only 36 years old.
2024-03-06 11:43:18
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