LIn 2017, the girl who ran with a bell tied to her ankle so that her parents would know where her little girl, only eight years old, was trotting, when she disappeared every now and then in the mountains of Cerdanyola, was proclaimed the best Spanish athlete of all time. She was Carmen Valero, maa of birth and Catalan of adoption.
His older sister was diagnosed with an asthma problem and the doctors recommended a change of scenery for the family.so the family moved to Cerdanyola, although later the life of Carmen developed in Sabadell. It was there where he studied, where he became an athlete and where he found his first job.
Carmen He started in athletics thanks to some friends, the sisters Juana and María Antonia Soler, who belonged to the Sabadell athletic youth club.. Later he moved to CN Barcelona, where new perspectives opened up for him.
“Running was a necessity for me, always. It’s like it was a tattoo. In my family there was no tradition. But I was running everywhere. I was crying to do it, and half an hour wasn’t enough. I wanted an hour. My father didn’t know what to do with me“, she recalled in 2018 when she was chosen as one of the 80 legends of Spanish sport coinciding with MARCA’s 80th anniversary.
The passion and his desire to gallop were still intact. “Now I do more other sports, but when I put on my sneakers Sometimes I go like a bullet and I have to tell myself ‘stop, stop, you’re injured, it’s not like before.’‘” she explained amused.
A pioneer who didn’t want to be
Carmen Valero broke schemes and barriers. As an athlete and as a woman in a Spain that is not very plural. They were the 70s and 80s. She was a pioneer and a reference almost without intending to. She just wanted to run, without further ado. When she started she had no goals, but she was the first Spanish athlete to participate in some Olympic Gamesin Montreal 1976in the tests of 800 and 1,500 meters. “I was a distance runner, but there were no long races and it was also fast,” she argued.
She was the only Spaniard who won a world cross country championship: He did it twice, in 1976 and 1977, to the astonishment of the majority of the Federation members who Not only did they not support women’s athletics, but they despised it without concealment or shame.
“They didn’t take us into account in meetings and prepared our entire annual calendar in just ten minutes. We didn’t count for them. In fact, there were those who told us that we were big-assed and busty.“, he commented with some regret but happy to see how times had happily changed.
But Carmen knew how to silence those contemptuous comments of the 70s and 80s and change the discriminatory conceptions with her records and her medals: she came first in the cross country modality for ocho to in Spain. Furthermore, he climbed to the highest drawer in the pdium spanish in 800, 1,500, 3,000 and 5,000 meters. And she was chosen as the best national athlete of the 20th century. In 2017, she was proclaimed all-time. In men, the distinction went to Fermán Cacho.
Retirement and triumphant return
In 1981 he retired from athletics, but five years later he returned to competition with enough strength to win the Spanish Individual Cross Country Championship for the eighth and last time.the one in Spain of 5,000 meters and the Jean Bouin.
Carmen was happy running, she did it out of personal desire, without pressure and without any rewards other than self-satisfaction. “The money they gave me for being world champion came to me to buy popcorn at the movies and little else”, he recalled. Then she was not aware of her exploits in Spanish and world athletics nor of her prowess as a female athlete. Then, as the years went by, yes.
Carmen, the one with the eternal smilethe Spanish queen of cross country, has left the indelible mark that great athletes leave in golden letters.Rest in peace.
