““Alvarito, I haven’t seen you here in a long time!” a neighbor says affectionately to Álvaro del Amo, who meets with MARCA next to the ONCE kiosk located on Agustín de Foxá street, between Plaza de Castilla and Chamartín station. It is located a few meters from his house. The Madrid native has been on leave for a yearsince won two bronzes in the 2023 World Cupone in disk and another in weight. It ends on March 1 and it is still not clear if it will be extended. The launcher He has won two bronzes also this summer at the Paris Paralympic Games. “I’m at my best,” he says.
“They ask me a lot about him,” admits Elisabethyour substitute in the sale of the coupon. “Many have been watching him at the Games,” he recalls. Álvaro himself feels the love of his neighbors and clients when he goes down to the kiosk from time to time. to buy the couponazo or the Eurojackpot and have a coffee in the cafeteria next door. With the World Cup medals, More than one customer asked him to pass them through the coupons “to see if it gave them luck”he recalls between laughs.
Álvaro del Amo visits the ONCE kiosk that he ran from 2018 to 2023.
Now he is visiting, but he is clear that despite his successes, he will sell the coupon again. “You can make a living from Paralympic sport as long as you are first, second or third in the world. Maintaining that for many years is very difficult. I am very clear that, depending on when the date of next year’s World Cup is, maybe I will extend the leave a little longer or I will start working directly on March 1. Obviously I have the medals and the support of the Paralympic Committee with its Medical and Psychological Services, in addition to the scholarship, but I know that a bad result in the World Cup can make it disappear. Luckily, I will have the coupons until I retire.“explains the blind pitcher.
You can make a living from Paralympic sports if you are among the top three in the world, but I will have the coupon until I retire
Blind since the age of 25
His disability is from birth, a degenerative retinitis pigmentosa. “Until I was 18 I lived a more or less normal life, I could read books and walk down the street without a cane. Until I was 22 I suffered a pretty big decline and then, At 25 or 26 he left me the way I am right now, where I only see lights and shadows.“he explains. “I knew that sooner or later that moment was going to come, but you’re never prepared for it. We all have an assimilation process and, in my case, I was a little more secluded for two or three years. You avoid it until you assimilate it, assume it and say: ‘There is no other option, we have to move forward.’ And there comes a day when you wake up and think about what to do with your life,” he reflects.
He stopped studying and started selling coupons in October 2012 to earn a living. And he spread luck. “Many years ago I gave a prize of about 40,000 euros to several people and then some ‘scratches’ of 1,000,” he reveals. Two years later he began to combine it with athletics. Since he was a child he was always good at throwing. In the Madrid school Olympics he always stood out. “In Physical Education I was always first in the class in medicine ball throws.”he confesses.
It was the launcher Alfonso Fidalgomedalist in Barcelona’92, Atlanta’96 and Sydney 2000 (5 gold and one silver) who He encouraged him to return to athletics. He was his boss and he invited him to go pitching when he got off work. At first it started as amateurwithout great aspirations, but his progression led him to start consider higher levels. There were two years left until the Rio Games, there was no time, so Tokyo was set as a realistic goal.
He debuted in his first World Cup in 2019 in Dubai, where he finished seventh in the shot put. Two years later, he hung himself his first medal at the European Championships in Poland and attended the Tokyo Games. “I remember them with great affection and enthusiasm for being the first, but now comparing them with Paris they have nothing to do with it,” he acknowledges.
Because in the Japanese capital, beyond the pandemic measures, there was no audience. This years in Stade de France in Paris, competed in weight and discus before nearly 70,000 people. “At first it’s very impressive. In fact, in the first two shots it was a mess.” because you notice all the roaring, but then I didn’t hear anything, not even the speaker and the clapping. You get so involved in competition that you forget that there are 70,000 people. However, On the last shot of the puck, as it left the hand and landed on the grass, I heard the entire stadium roar. There I was aware,” he says, laughing.
I had just beat his personal best in a last attempt with which he reached 39.60 meters. He had been in bronze positions until the fifth discus throw, in which the Iranian Mahdi Olad threw 39.15 meters and was knocked off the podium. He only had one more chance to sign the double -three days before he had won the bronze in weight- and, as he did a year before in the World Cup, He entered the court laughing and pitched to the podium. The tears and the hug with Jorge Gras, his coach since before the Tokyo Games, they were inevitable. The work of the last year had paid off.
Excess in the sale of the coupon
Because the leave had allowed to focus only on the Games to reach their best moment of form. “The bet I made on myself turned out well. In weight I have improved more than half a meter and in discus I have that bittersweet feeling because I improved 40 centimeters in competition but in training I had thrown 40 long and 41. But on a physical, mental and vital level, I think it is the best moment of my life,” he says, smiling, sitting in the small gym next to the Madrid CAR launch area, where we have been training for a year and where we have moved. Outside, it doesn’t stop pouring.
On a physical, mental and vital level, I think it is the best moment of my life
“There are days when it is raining, like today, and it feels lazy but you think that next year there will be a World Cup, that I have come from a Games where I have achieved results and that I am at the top. You always try to encourage yourself and if I don’t encourage myself, there are always people who pull me,” he says. And some of those people, like Jorge Gras and other of his pupils, are precisely training in the same facilities. The jokes and hesitations between They are constant, you can see the good atmosphere. “It’s everyone’s job because they share the effort with me. I always say that a part of the medals is theirsof all those who are there day to day and not only them, but the people who support me in my house and my family: my mother, my brother, my father, friends…”, he says.
With his training group, in which he is the only one with a disabilityhave formed a second family and, as such, many of them witnessed Álvaro’s successes in the Paris Games from the stands of the Stade de France, as were his relatives, whom he hugged as soon as they knew medalist.
The medals under the bed
“Being able to train at the High Performance Center is a privilege because the best Spanish athletes train here,” he says. Among the best is him, who although he has brought the two Paralympic bronze medals for the report at our request, he does not usually brag about them. On the contrary. He has them at home kept in a box under the bed’s couch. “I haven’t assembled any shelves or anything yet and my shelf project, in reality, is to put a hook or some nails on the wall and hang them,” he reveals with a laugh.
Nor has he been able to celebrate his success in the Games in style. In fact, it has not yet been possible to take a vacation. It will do it in December. He has also not been able to fulfill the promise that Jorge, his coach, and he made if they won a Paralympic medal: to go to the Octoberfest in Munich. They will have to leave it for next year.
What has already been done is the tattoo of the Agitos (the Paralympic logo) next to 2024 on the back of the left leg, almost at ankle level. He just got them tattooed the day before doing this report and his skin was still a little pink in the area. Complete a collection of tattoos among which is read in one of his arms ‘Walking metamorphosis’ written in braille.
