«I have witnessed two syncopes. It can happen, yes, yes. You see that a rival is going towards your goal, that your teammates have risen to the surface and you hold on until you can’t anymore. It can happen, but it’s rare. It is more normal for you to suffer some dizziness after the games,” he admits. Clara Martinez Basse-Korf, the captain of the Spanish underwater hockey team. Underwater hockey? Yes Yes.
In Spain, those who practice fencing, American football, weightlifting, wrestling, polo or modern pentathlon may be considered few, part of an exclusive group, but in reality there are hundreds and even thousands. This is a minority. The Spanish underwater hockey league has three women’s teams, from Madrid, Barcelona and Seville -in this order last year-, and each team has seven or eight players. Throughout the country, there are 22 practitioners. chimpun.
In the world there are many types of hockey and they are all based on the same thing. In the three most popular, ice hockey, field hockey and roller hockey, but also in the strangest ones, indoor hockey, floorball, beach hockey or underwater hockey itself, the objective is to hit the ball or puck with a stick to score in the opposite goal. In the case of underwater hockey, the oddities are that the stick is very short, that the punk is made of lead so that it does not float, and that it is played underwater!
«At the beginning, the most difficult thing is not to dive, it is to get used to the tube. We played with hard fins and a snorkel tube to never take our heads out of the water and thus always be able to see the puck. When you start that it generates rejection because before breathing you have to expel the water, but then you get used to it, “says Martinez Basse-Korf, who is not an underwater hockey professional, but who travels as if he were.
Physiotherapist with his own clinic in Madrid, Hende Fisioterapia, this July he will go with Spain to the World Cup held on the Gold Coast, in Australia -with savings and a help of 20,000 euros from Iberdrola-, and several weekends a year he goes to Paris to play the French League, a kind of NBA of this modality. In 2015 Hope Paris contacted her so that she was one of the two foreigners allowed by the competition and she has shared a team there with her sister for several seasons, Elenawho lives in UK.