Álex Maspons, by Sergio Heredia

On one occasion, during the Tokyo Games, Álex Maspons wrote to me (he wrote to Japan, of course, since I was covering those strange Games, with quarantine and a mask, without an audience in the stands, in an odd year…).

He wrote to me and asked me:

–Who is going to win the men’s triathlon? And the marathon? And road cycling?

I told him names.

I told him about Kristian Blummenfelt, Eliud Kipchoge and Tadej Pogacar.

In some cases I was right.

My friend told me about Dominican basketball and the Finnish javelin, and also about Barça

Days later, Álex Maspons (55) messaged me again: this time he sent me a generous amount through Bizum.

–Why are you sending me this? –I asked him.

–It is 10% of my profits from online betting. Thanks to your predictions, my profits have been magnificent.

I was happy that day, you can imagine.

And it wasn’t the first time.

(…)

Sports have kept us together during these years. I am traveling back to our times at Law School: in those eighties and nineties, we occupied a desk in the back row and between classes we swallowed Sports World and Sport. And then, we commented on them.

So much reading, so much restlessness, had turned him into a sports encyclopedia with legs. Álex Maspons talked to me about Dominican basketball and the Finnish javelin and also about Barça and also about his father, Oriol Maspons, portrait photographer of the Gauche Divinean indispensable character in Barcelona culture in the sixties and seventies.

(Lately, Álex Maspons managed his father’s artistic legacy, exhibited at the Palo Alto gallery in Poblenou, in the project Coral. The most intimate photograph of Oriol Maspons).

I last spoke to him this summer, weeks before the Paris Games. This time it was he who sent me a magnificent list: discipline by discipline, my friend analyzed the possibilities of all the Spanish Olympians.

–You give me is a treasure. You should be a sports journalist – I responded as I used to respond, before getting on the plane, heading to the City of Light.

Then it was his light that went out.

In a flash, a brain tumor came upon him, he plunged into a spiral of hospital admissions, returned home and, in silent meditation, said goodbye to Yesenia and his children, Max and Martina.

On Sunday, at the Ronda de Dalt funeral home, I said goodbye to this friend who has accompanied me through youth and maturity, and in the process I said to myself: “I have lost a guide.”

PS: He wanted to be buried dressed in Barcelona. Your wish has been fulfilled.

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