“Jacinto, the glasses, where are the glasses?!”, he wrote Maria Perez by Whatsapp to his coach, Jacinto Garzon. It was midnight on the most important day of her life, nine hours later she would be proclaimed world champion in the 20-kilometre walk, and the walker was still not sleeping in her room at the Thermal Margarita Island hotel in Budapest looking for the white glasses her. And do you know where they were? Well, in her suitcase, where always. I had never seen her so nervous », explained later Jacinto Garzón, her trainer. In the middle of the gold celebration, it no longer mattered, but Pérez barely slept three hours and needed melatonin to do so. It seemed like a bad sign, but it wasn’t. María was nervous because she knew that this time she could achieve something big, “Garzón commented in a conversation with EL MUNDO after the victory was settled.
The girl who surprised with a victory in the 2018 European Championships was confirmed yesterday as world champion after a painful process in which she thought of leaving athletics. She was fourth in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, her wife, the DJ Something Morillas, he went through cancer and, suddenly, Pérez forgot how to march. Last year she was disqualified in the World Cup and the European Championship. And that’s where it all started. “If they hadn’t eliminated me today, I wouldn’t be here celebrating a gold,” Pérez acknowledged in the mixed zone. The style change was long, but it worked. From her military march, gridded, very hard, which cost her many mistakes to her current march, pure flow, more flow there were months of inactivity, lots of videos and many, many queries. To all the world.
«The same day of the European I already received calls from many people who wanted to help us because it could not be that María, with so much potential, was disqualified twice. I listened to everyone. I met with judges to find out where we went wrong, with trainers and former walkers like Josep Marin, Jose Antonio Carrillo, Chuso Garcia Bragado, Robert Korzeniowski, Bea Pascual… I wanted to collect all the opinions and put them together. In the end we marked a line of work with Marín, but we had to convince María, “the coach Jacinto Garzón recalled yesterday. Because while he was looking for solutions, María Pérez demanded a break. From October of last year to January of this, the world champion today did not leave. Nothing. Not a step. She worked on the technique a couple of days a week, she watched the videos that Garzón gave her, but she continued to be disenchanted. She was just running so she wouldn’t lose shape. Until San Silvestre Vallecana.
Without ever having trained, he finished the fourteenth and received offers from various brands for him to switch to the road. That convinced him. His legs still worked, his heart still worked, the only thing missing was the damn technique. «María is from Orce, a small town in Granada, she comes from a working family, she had to leave home at the age of 16 to reach a high level. She is very hard headed, but she can also be very closed off in a band. With the help of her entourage and her friends, like Bea Pascual, she accepted the plan,” recalled Garzón. In February, in Cieza, her first joy came: she was the Spanish champion of the 35-kilometre walk. And then everything was filmed. «From there, María crushed herself like she never did. When she made the world record of 35 kilometers in May, the next day she woke me up at seven in the morning for a shoot », pointed out the coach.
With the help of biomechanics from the University of Granada, Pérez measured all his movements while walking, his feet further back, his arms looser, and he embraced all possible advances. For example, he would enter the hypoxia chamber at the University, pretend to be at 3,200 meters of altitude and complete a session of HIIT, high intensity training. For example, he spent a month at the Font Romeu High Performance Center, in the French Pyrenees, to go down to Budapest, almost to sea level, and compete on the fourth day, only on the fourth day. «He is in the best moment of his life and he still has the 35 kilometers on Thursday. We will speak again on Thursday, “warned Jacinto Garzón.