MADRID, 16 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Five women who were protagonists at different times in Spanish women’s sport reviewed their experiences this Wednesday and agreed on how hard and complicated it was for all of them to make their way.
Former basketball player Amaya Valdemoro, former golfer Marta Figueras-Dotti, former field hockey player Virginia Ramírez, former judoka Sacramento Moyano and former swimmer Mari Cruz Corominas were in charge of sharing their experiences at the opening of the ‘Women and Sports Conference ‘ organized by the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE)
“How happy I have been would have been a better title,” Valdemoro said in relation to his autobiographical book “I was born fighting.” “We are all tired of fighting because we have had to break many barriers and that sometimes tires,” he added.
The Madrilenian believes that in her time her sport was “in its infancy compared to now” and blamed it on the fact that women have “fought” it and have been able to show their “talent”. “And we have also done it from the heart because the economic and social reward has not been the same,” she stressed.
Valdemoro recalled a bad experience after winning the first of his three WNBA rings. “Nike organized a press conference for me and there were entities close to me that got angry and I couldn’t do it, I lost a moment of giving visibility,” she recalled.
“I can’t complain about the treatment of the media, but you look back and think what could have been”, clarified the former player who did not hide that in her role now as a commentator of her sport’s matches on ‘Movistar+’ she has had a hard time “bad at times” by critics. “I hope there are more women broadcasting men’s sports, that they give us the opportunity to teach everything we know,” she remarked.
For her part, Marta Figueras-Dotti, current president of the Women’s Golf Circuit and the first Spaniard to play at a professional level, also warned that she had “hard beginnings in a sport that was not well known.” “I qualified for the 1978 World Cup and asked to change a part of the Medicine course and they told me no,” she stressed.
However, despite this, he went to the appointment and the University of Southern California offered him an athletic scholarship. “What was going to be six months became 24 years in the United States,” she said, happy to have been in a country where “the visibility” of golf was already “enormous” and where she could “be a mother without stopping playing.” . “Now I want to give women’s golf what it gave me and I’m still fighting to give women the same opportunities,” she said.
Sacramento Moyano, a former judoka who won five continental medals and who was the first Spanish woman to obtain the 9th DAN, pointed out that at the beginning she believed that she was “not going to get anywhere”. “In the first Spanish Championship in which she was, it was like an exhibition, we women had to show that we knew how to do judo, but also technique. Now there are Olympic champions and that is the important thing, but it cost me a lot,” she commented.
Moyano emphasized the importance of the figure of Vicente Cepeda, who was her coach and is her husband. “She trusted us, she made a team and believed in women, she fought because she was the same as men,” she celebrated. “I don’t regret anything, I chose the right sport for me,” she declared.
Virginia Ramírez, who was part of the historic team that won the gold medal in field hockey at Barcelona’92, recognized that this success “was a surprise for the people”, but “not” for them, and thanked the national coach for his work José Brasa who “fully believed that this group of women could do something great.”
“He was able to convince us that with training and changing all our customs to be high-level athletes, which we were not, we could be in the semifinals,” added the former player who explained that they had “an innovative preparation” and that they chose to choose, from the three plans presented to them by the technician, the so-called “inhuman”. “When we won the gold we were aware of what we achieved, but the dimension you acquire with the passage of time, in fact it has not been repeated in hockey”, she pointed out.
Finally, Mari Paz Corominas, who was the first Spanish Olympic finalist in history in Mexico’68 and whose mother told her that her daughter should not swim because it would “masculinize” her, said that “surely” she was “lucky” with that achievement because he did not have “enough time to get into a final”. “It was historic and I realized little by little because she was only 16 years old then,” she assured.
The former swimmer then had the opportunity to train for six months in the United States and was able to get a taste of “high-level sport there.” “It was hard because I went from doing 6,000 meters a day to 12,000, but I improved in other specialties that were not mine, which was backstroke,” she said.