I leave you in front of the sea, deciphering you alone, without my blind question, without my broken answer
Mario Benedetti
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–I am sentimental –José María van der Ploeg (66) tells me.
And he gets emotional when he remembers that day.
The day in which his son, still a little José María (and with him are three generations of Josemarias), asked him: ‘Why do you go sailing with children my size but you don’t take me?’.
–And you, what did you answer?
–I told him: ‘You’ve never asked me.’ And then I suggested that he come on our boat for the Godó Trophy. ‘If you enjoy it, I’ll take you with us to the J80 World Cup in Denmark.’ And we won that Godó and were second in the World Cup. And until now we often sail together…!
And he gets emotional remembering those days.
He cries, big man, a great father proud of his child. And in the cafeteria, some customers look at us surreptitiously.
(I would tell them: ‘This man who gets emotional when talking about his son won Olympic gold in the Finn class in Barcelona ’92. Van der Ploeg only repeats: ‘I am sentimental.’ And he smiles.)
–When my son was very little, I was little with him, you know? Ivone and I had it in 2000, at the end of my Olympic campaign. Then I started my professional career with my company, Vdeploeg Consulting, a sports consultancy. He traveled a lot.
–Will your son be a professional sailor like you were?
–Let’s see, I prefer my father’s system. May José María learn with me, as I did with my father. My father had no influence on me and my son, who is an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in Sweden, has no intention of taking the leap either. And I tell you not to tempt your luck, because I had it, and a lot of it.
(The subconscious leads me to think of Gabriel García Márquez: the Nobel Prize winner in Literature was worried about his children. He feared that his figure as a writer would crush them; I am about to propose the reflection, but the man anticipates me).
–Today, high competition is terrible. In my time, which was that of Gorostegui, the Dorestes, Abascal, Benavides… it was something else. Except for the East, which trained professionals, we were only beginning to be so. We went hand in hand with Miguel Company, who was president of Española, a visionary who created a model in Palamós, the National Sailing School, with three brilliant coaches who recruited sailors throughout Spain.
They ran over my wife six days before Barcelona’92; “She came out unscathed, but something like that could have sunk me.”
–And you lived from sailing?
-Noooo. Between Barcelona’92 and Atlanta’96 I had the ADO scholarship, little else. By the way, I prepared Barcelona in 19 months.
–…?
–Until then, I was a coach. I was José Luis Doreste’s coach in his Finn gold medal in Seoul ’88. He also worked with Española. I was a good sailor in finn, I won regattas, but the federation wanted me as a coach. One day at the end of 1990, Josep Seguer told me: ‘What are you doing? You should try it.’ He promised to train me. We sat and talked.
Josep Seguer reminded him that there was no coach like him (“you took Doreste to world gold with little wind and to European gold with a lot of wind”), that there was no physique like his (“he was 32 years old and weighed 93 kilos, he was overweight.” of strength; we just had to lose weight, tune up: come on, I went jogging along the Diagonal and the Aigües road”) and that they had to focus on the psychological aspect, their weak point.
–For months, we dealt with all those aspects that made me lose control. And we did it well, I’ll tell you why: six days before those Games, my wife was run over. A cargo car from the port ran over him. Ivone may have lost a leg, but she only suffered third-degree burns. We made him stay with my sister and I stayed in the Olympic Village. That was a small miracle. At any other time, something like that would have sunk me. However, it was a sign: he was ready. I won those Games even without starting in the seventh race.
(Again, his eyes water.)
–…?
–I am so grateful to the entire team that I asked Laura, my sister, to make dozens of replicas of my medal. She is a jeweler. I distributed them among everyone to express respect and affection.
–And yours, where is it?
–In a case of my father’s glasses, kept in a safe.
(Today, José María van der Ploeg is running as first vice president in Alejandro Rusiñol’s candidacy for the elections of Club Nàutic El Balísthe project that moves him the most now).
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