I usually run into Carlos Ruf in my neighborhood. His figure is unmistakable, a beacon in the night. Carlos Ruf is 2.10 m tall.
On one occasion when I was accompanied by my nephew Thilo and my daughter Julia, who were quite young at the time, I saw Carlos Ruf on the terrace of a cafeteria. When we approached to greet him, I asked him to stand up.
As my friend got up, I focused on the little ones’ gaze. They couldn’t get over their astonishment. They had never encountered a giant of such dimensions, never in person.
On other occasions, this time without the company of Thilo or Julia, Carlos Ruf and I shared a table and had a coffee. The giant is a monumental encyclopedia. We often talk about basketball: Carlos Ruf was an important center in the nineties, a pillar of that powerful Joventut, that of Jofresa, Villacampa, Jiménez, Morales and Corny Thompson.
Other times we talk about our parents.
I have two families. “The one I share with my wife and my children and the one I share with my athletes.”
A couple of years ago, Carlos Ruf told me that his son, Hans Ruf, was acting out. That he was already old, that he was fading. This Friday he called me to tell me that his father had passed away.
He was 84 years old.
In athletics circles, the news spread like wildfire, because Hans Ruf had been an exceptional technician, the sporting father of dozens of Spanish jumpers, mostly pole vaulters, but also sprinters, high and long jumpers, and even throwers.
Han Ruf, in the eighties, at the Serrahima stadium in Barcelona
On the last birthday of a diminished Hans Ruf, a fan of disciples had organized to honor him. So many years later, there was Alberto little wolf Ruiz, one of his most faithful pupils (Olympic in Los Angeles’84 and Barcelona’92), reading the list of celebrities of the teacher.
(Somehow, little wolf has inherited Hans Ruf’s role as head pole vault technician in Spain and at the CAR of Sant Cugat).
In the image that illustrates the obituary four of those pupils appear, all of them behind Hans Ruf (from left to right, Javier García Chico – bronze in pole vault in Barcelona’92, the greatest international milestone of the Spanish discipline), little wolf Ruiz, Dani Martí and Juan Gabriel Concepción), but many more shone. This is a multigenerational list that links Roger Oriol, Martí Perarnau, José Carbonell and Loles Vives with Dolors Tobella, José Luis Canales, Francesc Mas, Javier Gazol or Dídac Salas.
They all shone under the umbrella of Hans Ruf, a sports father who, after dinner, at his home in Pedralbes, said to the family:
–Actually I have two families. The one I share with you and the one I share with my athletes.
Well, this other giant (Hans Ruf was over 1.90 m), son of a German father and Spanish mother, who came to Spain in those years when the Spaniards went to Germany, the third of three athlete brothers and the father of two basketball players, had made the sport his flagship and lived devoted to all his disciples: in his beginnings as a coach, with limited means, in a country without a pole vault culture, he devised artisanal methods to multiply the performance of his disciples, and among them the Russian belt as plyometric strength development.
Among his athletes, very few abandoned their umbrella.
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