At these games, I was the oldest sailor competing.
From the day I decided to join Ceci
and participate in an Olympic campaign,
my dream was to win a gold medal.
One day they told me that I was going to have
a piece of my lung removed.
The nine months following the surgery until Rio
required the greatest effort of my sporting career by far.
Santi never threw in the towel, he never gave up. Never.
(AGAINST ALL ODDS. SANTIAGO LANGE)
(PRESENTED BY BRIDGESTONE)
Rio was exciting because the same happens at sea as on land.
Anything can happen.
The first two or three days after the championship started
you saw that it was going to be between those in front.
Santiago and Cecilia were not the best on any day
of their Olympic campaign. However, they did obtain
the best average across the championship.
But, as always, everything can fail.
In fact, in the last race he had it very difficult.
(MEDAL RACE. SAILING NACRA 17)
We were in first position
for the Medal Race on the general table,
in a 20-minute race where anything can happen.
We had to defend that first place.
Absolutely nothing in it,
so just one position change
for any of those boats will affect the whole of the race.
Australia and Austria were the two countries
that posed the biggest threat.
If we were in the first three, we would win gold, for sure.
And if we were in the top five, we would be certain of a medal.
The Medal Race encapsulates
in 20 minutes all that my life has been about.
Sailing is in Santi's blood.
His family were sailors.
His father competed in a navy vessel.
My husband took them out to the boat,
and he loved to see the river.
Santiago could never stay away from the water.
He could not be far from water,
from the sea, the stars,
from his entire inner life.
And he has a communion with water
that is out of the ordinary.
(YACHTING CLUB SAN FERNANDO, ARGENTINA)
The only thing I wanted to do was to sail.
But my old man said to me, "You have to study something."
There was no possibility of continuing to sail
and having no backup plan.
We went to study together in England
when we were 18 or 20 years old.
We liked naval design.
The only place where you could study that was in England
and there we went,
thinking, both he and I, that our future was going to be
designing or constructing ships.
My father gave me money for the whole year
and we spent it in three months,
going to compete in three international championships.
He transported the ship on a dolly,
and then it was loaded on a ferry and he went to France.
Walking the three or four kilometres with it
until he got to the club, he navigated, won,
and then returned with the ship and the trophy,
bringing the dolly back with him again.
Santi won almost everything he raced in.
As a child, Santi won the Optimist,
then he won several World Championships at Snipe.
So I preferred to dedicate myself
to sailing professionally.
In '88 he was 26,
when a sporting career
is usually over for most sportsmen.
It was hard to imagine that a person of that age
was going to have the time to do what Santi did next.
It was the worst possible start we could have had.
And there it is, they're under way
at the Nacra 17. This is the final gold medal race.
We, along with most of the fleet,
decided to go to the right and really ease the sails.
You don't have right of way.
The one trying to go left has the right of way.
Like a line of cars.
Even before it began, we received our first penalty.
An issue with the Australians.
They were coming second.
If they had been first, they would have won the gold.
Basically, if you're in the right, you've got the rights,
and the boat on port is required to keep clear.
To get out of this, they needed to turn themselves around.
By the time they had finished the turn,
they were at least 100 metres behind the penultimate boat.
We started the regatta last,
at a great distance from the nearest competitor.
(CLUB NAUTICO SAN ISIDRO, ARGENTINA)
In terms of sports, I have suffered a lot of adversity
throughout my career.
It was very difficult to get there,
given the precariousness of the means that he had,
because it had been difficult for him to secure sponsors,
support from the State and so on.
In Argentina we didn't have the possibility to travel to Europe
when I first started.
Being able to go to the Olympic Games,
which I was able to do in '88, was already so much.
And I went with borrowed sails and a borrowed boat.
It was my second international championship.
Athens 2004 marked the creation of a great team,
with someone we both had been dreaming about since '93.
We raced in different categories in '96
and in the 2000 Olympic Games.
There was an illusion
that united all in the general nautical world,
and that was that Argentina would win a medal
after so many years.
Why not someday sail together
and go in search of a gold medal for our country?
It looked like we were going to have the resources,
and then in 2001 came the crisis in Argentina
and we were left with no money.
We thought, "Ciao."
We would be able to compete on equal terms.
And we raced in a championship.
Getting a medal was, for me, something incredible.
It was a dream to win a medal.
But I never found out why we lost,
because I cannot find one mistake that would allow me
to say, "Look, in this race we failed here."
We raced some great regattas, but we lost.
I am convinced that Santi
continued on in his search for the gold medal
because he knew that we were very close.
We got together for a year, between games,
and since we had such little time
and it was thought that there
would be very little wind in Beijing,
we didn't do any training for very windy conditions.
The first day was a very difficult day.
Only 15 boats compete at the Olympic Games.
That first day with Santiago we ended in 13th place.
We had a very windy day at the Olympic Games
and that meant we lost the gold.
The two bronzes,
I wouldn't say they were anything to be scoffed at, no.
But I knew we could win the gold.
(OLYMPIC GAMES. RIO DE JANEIRO. 2016)
How are we going to take advantage of the opportunities
of this regatta
so that we can recover all that we have to?
Can Santiago Lange, at 54 years of age,
can he come through the fleet?
I stuck my head out of the boat to look for an opportunity.
The whole fleet had moved to the left of the racecourse,
and I decided to continue to the right.
Ceci looked at me and said, "Old man, make some magic."
I replied to her, "Calm down, baby, it's going to be OK."
And then they began to recover.
You see him crumpled over, 55 years old,
racing against kids that are 23, 24, 26...
"Come on, old man, fuck!"
And he went on, and on, and he reached as far as he could.
We reached the first buoy closer to ninth place.
He recovered something that seemed almost impossible.
We reached the second buoy in sixth position.
It was exciting, it was...
It was crazy.
(CLUB NAUTICO SAN ISIDRO, ARGENTINA)
I felt that Santi's mind-set
was focused on returning to the Olympic Games.
He was reaching a very important stage in his life,
as is the possibility of
sharing the Olympic experience with his children.
And he knew it,
and the possibility of winning a gold medal was still pending.
I was training my children
completely outside of the Olympic arena.
We called him "the sponsor".
He was our sponsor, and I think he was the main sponsor
of our campaign for two or three years.
Yago had already begun his Olympic campaign for Rio.
I suffer a lot.
I see my children's regattas and I suffer,
like any father would.
I said, "No, I cannot be a coach."
That change of direction in the campaign was very important
because he also found his partner Cecilia
to sail in Nacra.
The meeting with Santi,
we could say that it was something magical,
because I clearly went to ask him for advice
about the matter of my sports career.
I said, "Well, I'm going to see Santi.
"This old sea dog will have some advice to give me."
Following that crazy conversation,
full of impulsiveness, I asked,
"Why don't you sail with me?" but Ceci would not answer me.
And I thought to myself,
"This little girl who will not answer me,
"who does she think she is?
"Does she think I'm too old to sail?"
When I was one, he competed in his first Olympic Games.
And before I was even a thought,
he had already attempted to qualify for the Olympic Games.
I told him, "Look, we'll give it a try.
"I don't know if my knees will hold out,
"or if I'm going to have the motivation."
Out of that meeting and my subsequent questions
came Santi's return to the Olympics.
When he announced that he was going to race,
those who knew him said, "Wow, and what for?
"You have two medals in the mixed Tornado class."
When I am presented with a challenge, I get passionate.
The greater the challenge, the more it motivates me.
(CLUB NAUTICO SAN ISIDRO, ARGENTINA)
I have a lot of belief in young people.
With that desire, that ambition, so eager to learn.
That creates a tremendous effervescence effect.
I had never worked as a coach.
At that time, if I'm not mistaken,
Santiago was 52 years old.
I was 19.
He was my idol.
Suddenly, we found ourselves caught up in the madness
that we were going to race in the Santander World Cup,
which was the first classification round
for the Rio Olympic Games, and we were world runners-up
after having sailed together, I don't know, for 30 days.
It was crazy.
We were already in Rio, now all that was left was
for Klaus and Yago to come to Rio.
I wanted, as a family,
to share the Olympic Games together.
Clearly, the classification in Santander
for the Olympic Games
was key to our campaign.
If we had not classified in Santander,
we were sure to have a problem
because later on we were in the middle of...
we were caught up in another problem which was bigger
than qualifying for the Olympic Games.
(OLYMPIC GAMES. RIO DE JANEIRO. 2016)
The Argentinians, if they can get back into this race...
Third place was already at stake,
and he knew that if he finished third
he was guaranteed the gold.
The anxiety we felt going forward.
We continued to force our way to overtake boats.
Ooh, I think that could be another penalty there.
Then came the situation in which we had dubious passing
with the Austrians.
- It's a penalty. - Yes, it's a penalty!
- Everything was very fast. - These were critical moments.
"Stop, stop! Let's see where we are."
That's a penalty against the gold medallist.
And there was no time to speak,
because the regatta was already very tense.
It cannot be that you are penalised again
when you have recovered
that which is normally unrecoverable.
All the work we had done was disappearing.
And, well, then what happened happened.
(CLUB NAUTICO SAN ISIDRO, ARGENTINA)
The old man always took flights
and we were with him at a competition
and he was sick the entire day of training.
What one feels when they are sick is very bothersome.
The relationship sometimes became tense,
because he was sick.
With all the travel and time differences
and the competitions and demands,
during 2014 I got sick all the time.
"No, I'm in Valencia now, but I'm sick.
"It feels as though the planes are making me sick.
"Aah, no, I'm sick again, with the flu.
"Hey, guys, close the windows or else I'll get the flu."
He would go sailing again,
and then lie down to rest, to recover,
but he never recovered.
I started to have some tests done. Nobody found anything.
One doctor after another, "What's wrong with me?"
Until one of them found the lump in my lung
and that's when everything started.
He told me that he had a lump in his lung.
He said to me, "I have lung cancer."
"This cannot be happening to you. Don't tell me this."
Why me?
I had taken care of myself, I was a healthy guy.
I eat healthily, I don't smoke,
I don't drink alcohol, I play sports.
And this was always hard for me to understand.
Why was this happening to me?
But to be defeated, never.
This was the reality that I was living in
and I had to go through it.
(HOSPITAL QUIRON, BARCELONA, SPAIN)
That lump needed surgery.
I always say that nobody
should be taken into surgery forcefully,
but in this case, waiting would have proven fatal.
"Will I recover to make it to the Olympics?
"I will have surgery, but I want to go to the Olympics."
We said, "With so many months to go,
"and because you will have the surgery today,
"the logical thing is that you
"will be ready in time for the Olympics.
"Not with the same lung capacity,
"because we are going to remove a piece of lung."
It's surgery that we can only perform
on three out of every ten patients
that have a lung tumour.
It was a very complicated procedure.
You didn't know whether he is going to live or not,
the old one over there.
And nothing, to see his face...
I remember that he grabbed my finger and said to me,
"Well, see you."
And you don't know whether you will see him again or not.
Honestly, there was something telling me
that everything was going to be OK
and the family spirit was one of...
there was a spirit of "let's get over this".
The relationship with my children
is the most important thing in my life.
Much more than sports.
I had a nice talk to Yago and they all said to me,
"Dad, I want to go, I want to be there with you.
"To me, the most important thing is to be there with you."
We did a number of crazy things.
Trying to classify for the Olympics,
while he was getting surgery.
They had a great challenge, a big dream,
which was to be able to participate in the Games,
and I said to them, "No, stay there.
"Calm down, I'm going to be all right."
Fortunately, I don't have to tell you the story
about my father dying
while he was trying to go to the Olympics.
From the first videos that I received,
there is one where he is walking,
holding the bag that was connected to his machines
for medication,
and these were the first steps he took, with Theo.
OK, we're here with the old man here, walking like a champion.
Then he made a move as though
he was pretending to play squash,
which is the one thing we all like,
and it was very impressive to see the old man there...
the old man walking like that,
and as they had made some incisions on his throat,
he wasn't able to talk.
Then, it was, "Hello, Borja, how are you?"
Good morning, puppies.
Here waiting for Edu to go home.
This is the last visit to the hospital.
A tremendous view.
This is the armchair that saved me on a couple of nights.
The button to call the nurses.
The nurses would answer me through here,
"Yes?"
The bathroom button is so stiff that I couldn't press it.
But hey, now...
..I can press it without a problem.
That's why I'm being discharged.
So I think that today we should go to Cabrera.
I love you, champ.
It is very important to me that you are here with me.
Hey, boss. Let's go, Theo.
Just as to me the most important thing
that Yago and Klaus could do at that moment
was to prepare for their big dream,
it was nice to know that Theo and Borja were there,
that for them
the most important thing was to accompany me
at such a special time.
(CABRERA DE MAR, SPAIN)
When sailing, and more so in a Nacra,
a ship that really flies,
respiratory capacity is very important.
He told me, "I can't breathe."
Suddenly, in the middle of closing haul,
I felt like I didn't have enough air.
Let's remember that where there were two lung lobes,
now only one remains.
That one remaining lower lobe
has to occupy the rest of the haemothorax.
I had so little strength that couldn't turn the boat.
We just sailed to one side.
The nine months from the surgery to Rio
required the greatest effort in my entire sports career
by far.
(MEDAL RACE. MANOEUVRE PENALTY)
Yes, yes.
This is it.
This is the losing of a gold medal for Argentina!
I saw how much ground he had to recover
after the penalty he was given.
And I thought that that was it.
Anyone would have lost the chance of a medal,
not only the gold one.
The mistake has already been made, and then you must fix it.
..and put that down to that infringement at the top mark.
Suddenly, we saw that the globe went down,
that it had made a 360-degree turn...
We really thought that it was very difficult.
You don't get excited, because it's impossible.
You have already learned
that you are in the middle of the sea,
and then a storm comes, and you can't say,
"Well, I'm getting out here."
Santi never threw in the towel, he never gave up. Never.
(CABRERA DE MAR, SPAIN)
Santi started cycling and, of course, he got tired.
There beside me, pedalling with a lot of enthusiasm?
The support of my friends, of my children, of my family,
they were great supports in being able to overcome this
and look ahead with optimism and confidence.
At this very table, Ceci said,
"We have to go to live in Rio,
"we can't afford to lose even a day."
There was no time for anything but the Olympic Games.
It was very arduous.
The physical preparation we had to do was very arduous
and the number of them that we had to navigate,
but we could carry on thanks to our mental preparation.
You can be sailing, in the middle of the sea,
and can be doing yoga
because you are connected to yourself,
with what you are doing.
You are enjoying what you are doing,
and you are doing what you want to do, that is yoga.
It is part of our work method.
One of the most important tools that we use is visualisation.
If I think I'm going to win,
and I feel confident that I am going to win,
the body begins to create neural connections
so that when the time comes
it is going to start acting in that way.
When we visualised, we imagined what we wanted.
We were the ones who trained the most.
We were the ones that spent the most time in that place,
we did not take breaks.
By April, we had already won two regattas.
Then we could see that we were the fastest.
The guys were going home and we stayed on in Rio,
training every day.
My dream was to get to the Olympic Games
with the possibility of winning a medal.
I felt invincible,
I felt like I was there operating at 200%.
(OLYMPIC GAMES, RIO DE JANEIRO, 2016)
When we were at the ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, he told us,
"Guys, maybe we'll never walk in an Olympics parade
"together again. "
What I felt that night, sentimentally and emotionally,
was as big as having won a medal.
(MEDAL RACE. ENDING CLOSE-HAULED)
Two unforced errors by Argentina! Wow!
After the second penalty in the men's final regatta,
at that moment of tension
where it seemed as though we had lost the medal,
and Cole and I were almost crying,
there was a moment when Cole touched me on the back
and made me turn.
Dani was there with his eyes closed and smiling.
And I began to visualise,
and I started to see them...
..reaching the finish line.
And I saw them with their arms raised,
I saw them winning.
I could see them winning
and I felt that they were going to win.
It was a moment of relaxation
and the three of us gave each other permission to laugh
because the reality was that it was totally out of our hands.
What you believe,
you can create.
It could be Argentina, still, for gold.
It could be!
I started to see the arrivals and I did not see Argentina.
I start to see flags from other countries
and I wondered, "What's going on here?"
As it was so clear to me that what guaranteed us the gold
was finishing in the top three. And as we were guaranteed
a medal if we finished in the first five,
when I arrived to the finish line, and as we were sixth,
I thought we had lost all chance of a medal.
Argentina come over the line!
I wanted to know the final positions.
People were saying everything.
One said that I had not won a medal,
another that I had the bronze, another didn't know.
I thought Australia had won the regatta,
and, with the points we had, I thought we were in second.
But, luckily, I was wrong.
I confused the Australian flag with New Zealand's.
The New Zealanders had won the race
and with this result, we had won the gold.
It is fascinating.
It's beautiful to have won a gold medal.
It's very beautiful to have fulfilled a dream
after so much work,
so many experiences, so much effort.
But the most important thing is the journey.
That person who, as a kid, began to dedicate himself
to his passion.
Since the first Argentine championship
that I won, the Optimist, which I won the last year
I would be able to compete in the category,
until what happened with the gold,
somehow, it was like closing the circle of a life
dedicated to a passion.
The Medal Race should remain a testimony
to what can be achieved
and about not giving up.
The cancer made him win the medal.
I once said,
"We had the bad luck to have had to go through
"this situation of adversity."
And when I finished the sentence I said,
"Maybe it was not bad luck."
Maybe all that had to happen
so that lots of other nice things could happen to us,
among them, winning the gold medal.
It was worth it.
The Medal Race encapsulates
in 20 minutes all that my life has been about.
Adversities, and getting up and going on.
For more infomation >> Ultime notizie: Barbara D'Urso svuota il sacco gossip e chirurgia: la replica inaspettata| K.N.B.T - Duration: 2:58. 
For more infomation >> Peugeot 508 1.6 E-HDi 2-Tronic SW Lease Executive - Duration: 1:01. 
For more infomation >> DANGEROUS passengers of the TRAIN. Traynham and PDS + eng. subtitles - Duration: 6:18. 
For more infomation >> Carthago Chic C-Line T 4.3 - Duration: 0:59. 
For more infomation >> Herbert Erpaderp - The Returnening II: Electric Boogaloo. - Duration: 3:04. 
For more infomation >> General Hospital 6/23/17 - Duration: 36:13. 
For more infomation >> Clicking for pennies really sucks! PPV stinks - Duration: 0:32. 
No comments:
Post a Comment