Tired faces and still restless looks. Several of the members of the Txuri Urdin expedition who have experienced one of the worst weekends of … week that they remember, they went yesterday to the Anoeta Ice Palace to organize what they had experienced and share how they are on their return home. The training scheduled for yesterday was cancelled. The template is not for it. The important thing is to recover physically and mentally from what happened in Puigcerdà.
«Now that we have returned home we are beginning to be aware of what has happened, because when you are there, the pressure and stress are reduced, the desire to move forward comes out without stopping to think. We can say that little by little we are recovering our routine and the most important thing is that each of us feels well,” says Ainhoa Salillas.
He explains how once they received the order to evacuate they decided to “go out with what we had at the time, without thinking much. María, one of the captains, yelled at us to grab coats but we got out as best we could. Some barefoot, in bras… It was very overwhelming, all our things were inside and we didn’t know when we were going to be able to get them back.
She is one of the athletes who collapsed in the improvised field hospital outside. “At first most of us felt fine, but once the serious symptoms started, the worry really started,” he confesses, still with shock in his body.
The Txuri-Urdin squad on the Puigcerdà court.
white
She was part of the group rushed to a Barcelona hospital on Monday to receive oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber. He does not hide that “it was surreal, we did not know what we were facing. We were scared because we didn’t know what that was, what it consisted of. I think about it, and thank goodness I was with my teammates, the fact that everything happened as a team has made it easier.
“It’s very difficult to process”
While Ainhoa and part of the squad stayed in Barcelona, another group decided to continue with the return trip. A complicated decision as Uma Apo-Sang explains. «It was not easy to leave only half, it was a time of great uncertainty and stress. “We always all come back together, but we had to make the decision to separate for the return.” He agrees with Salillas that “when we arrived in Donosti we were more aware of what had happened. At times it doesn’t seem real, it has been like waking up from a bad dream. “It is very difficult to process everything that has happened to us at the moment.”
For the Argentine, “the most complicated moment was when we were left without news about the health of several of the colleagues, it was a shock to see colleagues feeling bad” and once the worst is over, it is also the turn to smile. «We may have done a master’s degree in gases, inhalation or hyperbaric chambers. We were trying to understand what was happening by searching for it on the internet. “I think I’m going to start reading more so I can understand what happened to us.”
Keep reading
