Carmen Valero, first Spanish Olympic athlete, dies

It was 42 years ago when his name remained forever in the history of athletics. At the Chepstow racecourse (Wales), Carmen Valero did something that today is almost unimaginable. A Spanish athlete won the World Cross Country Championship. It was 1976, and the woman from Teruel by birth and Catalan by adoption beat Tatyana Kazankina to win the title. She was only 21 years old, exceptionally talented, and capable of becoming champion again the following year, where she won in Düsseldorf ahead of Lyudmila Bragina (USSR). Two victories that made her unique, since no one in Spain has managed to climb to the top of the podium in a world cross country championship. But for her, it all came down to something very simple. “What I liked was running.” Thus, in this way, those two world championships arrived, 25 national titles and 15 Spanish records, a presence at the Montreal Olympic Games, the first for a Spanish athlete. All of this served to ensure that in 2017 she was proclaimed the best Spanish athlete of all time.

Carmen Valero, who was enjoying her early retirement on a bench and receiving tributes, died this Tuesday as a result of a stroke suffered last week, for which she was admitted to intensive care, according to the Spanish Athletics Federation, which has remembered on social networks with a message in which she highlights that she was “the first Spanish Olympic athlete, a woman who paved the way and the mother of our athletics.”

Valero, 68 years old, was born in the Teruel town of Castelserás on October 4, 1955, although he very soon left for Catalonia, settling in Sabadell, where he died. “I feel half Catalan and half clever,” he said on different occasions.

He started in athletics in 1969 with coach Josep Molins – who died in March 2023 -, at Joventut Atlètica de Sabadell, where he began to excel.

She was the first Spanish Olympic athlete, at the 1976 Montreal Games, in which she competed in the 800 and 1,500 meter events. In addition, his record includes fifteen Spanish track championships in distances such as 3,000 and 5,000 meters and those two world cross country championships in Chepstow 1976 and Düsseldorf 1977, being 25 times international and national record holder in the 800, 1500 and 3,000 meters in those years.