Pride is the driving force of champions, Ana Peleteiro for example, and it is expressed in the form of rage, fury, they will find out, and also love born of sadness, as the Galician athlete, so sentimental, who, with her voice sometimes breaking, will be the emotion, explains in a press conference in Madrid, the reasons and circumstances of her latest decision: to stop training in Guadalajara under the orders of Iván Pedroso, the architect of her successes – double European champion, outdoors and indoors, triple jump; bronze medalist at the Tokyo Games, national record holder (14.87m) – to return to her land, to her town, Ribeira, in A Coruña, where she will train in a stadium that bears her name under the orders of her husband “and life partner”, the French Benjamin Compaoré, 37 years old. “I have always let myself be guided by my heart,” she says. “But this time, for the first time, I wasn’t impulsive; I thought about it a lot.”
“Sadness made me think on the night of the Paris Games,” says Peleteiro, 28, who went to the Games as one of the favourites and on a rainy night with bad jumps finished sixth at the Stade de France. “I spent the whole night thinking about the reasons for my poor performance and at five in the morning I called my agent to tell him that I had decided to return to Galicia with Benjamin and Lúa, our daughter, who is about to turn two. Afterwards I spoke to my family, and they all supported me. There was no turning back.”
If anyone wasn’t surprised by the decision of the most popular Spanish athlete, it was Pedroso himself, who, Peleteiro says, told her that he had already imagined it would be like this, and that he was even surprised that she returned to him last year, after her maternity leave, because he saw very clearly that her new family situation was going to make life very hard for her. “Let’s not forget that Iván is tied to Guadalajara because he has an eight-year-old daughter there,” says Peleteiro. “He knows what that is like. And he told me very clearly that he supported my decision and that he would celebrate my victories.”
Peleteiro barely held out in Guadalajara and only to achieve her Olympic goal in Paris, the end of a season in which she was a bronze medallist in the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow in March, and gold in the European Championships in Rome in June. “But since I was little I knew that if I had a daughter I would want her to live as happy as I did in Ribeira with my parents, and that couldn’t happen in Guadalajara. I dreamed of my daughter being with her grandparents in Galicia,” she explains, protecting her emotion behind the screen of an iPad on which she has written a few lines. “It has been very hard to reconcile my family life and my professional life. It has been 11 years since I left home, before I turned 18. I am returning to Ribeira, to Galicia, to my refuge. Life in Guadalajara and training with Iván were already pure routine. Benjamin and I lived isolated. Too many hours together, at home. My body and my head were asking me for new things. And my mother is going to retire soon. She will have her granddaughter with her. What more could you ask for? Peleteiro will also benefit financially, as she will save Pedroso’s salary, while her husband will receive the Adidas and ADO plan for coaches.
The Galician athlete was a prodigy from childhood, and has always survived her decisions, and improved. Matured. European junior champion in 2011 and world junior champion in 2012. In June 2013, she left Galicia, with Abelardo Moure, her first coach, to settle in the CAR in Madrid and in the Blume Residence, to train with Juan Carlos Álvarez, Carlota Castrejana’s coach. The adventure lasted less than three years and was not fruitful. At the beginning of 2016, she embarked on a trip to Portugal in the group of coach João Ganço, the coach of Olympic champion Nelson Évora. Only a few months later, after the Rio Games, Évora broke off a 25-year relationship and went to Guadalajara to train with Pedroso, and with him, Peleteiro. Pedroso accepted after consulting with Yulimar Rojas, the Venezuelan goddess of the triple jump, whom he was already training.
“They always criticise athletes who change coaches, as if we were the property of the coaches, and it seems strange to do so, but many athletes have changed,” says Peleteiro, who cites the examples of great champions who changed, such as the Frenchman Teddy Tamgho, who left his discoverer, the late Frenchman Jean-Hervé Stievenart, to go to Guadalajara with Pedroso, Shelly Ann Fraser Pryce, Tamberi, Lavillenie, Katherine Johnson Thompson… “And Benjamin is a very good coach. I have already trained with him. I keep my sporting ambition alive. I want to jump 15 metres. I have very high goals for Los Angeles 28. I want to jump as well as when I was 14 and broke the Spanish youth record with 12.70m. I recently saw the video and I am amazed at how naturally he jumped, how well he did it. I have never jumped so well again.”
Also trained by Stievenart at INSEP in Paris, Compaoré is a 17.48m triple jumper and European champion in 2014. For years he has combined active practice with his work as a coach, most notably with the Frenchman Enzo Hodebar, a 25-year-old triple jumper with 17.05m, European U-23 runner-up in 2021 and finalist at the European Championships in Munich. “At Ribeira you can do high-level athletics,” concludes Peleteiro. “And there I feel protected from so much hate that comes to me on the networks, from so much judgment from everyone…”
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