It was the night of nights at the stadium. At the circuit in Budapest, and the night is even wetter than the day, as if the Danube held the heat and wanted to cook alone under the moon, Femke Bol, a baby-faced young Dutch girl with pigtails, flies over 10 hurdles and laps the route in 51.70 seconds; En route to Usain Bolt’s record, Noah Lyles, as always, manages the barbarian (19.76 seconds) in the semifinals of the half lap of the 200m, where Sha’Carri Richardson, as usual, fell asleep for a while. a while before accelerating like an unsuspecting woman late in realizing she’s missed the train; Greek Olympic champion Miltiades Tentoglou does a pedroso and surpasses Jamaican phenomenon Wayne Pinnock’s 8.50m with a sixth jump of 8.52m. What an accelerated stride upon reaching the killer board that made his friend and compatriot slip in front of Carey McLeod, she slid headlong across the sand and won her first World Cup; Mo Katir smiles at the press, recites his three C’s, his three great values, inspired by his compatriot Carlos Alcaraz, “heart, head and balls” and salutes after being one of the 17 finalists along with Ouassim Oumaiz from Nerja from Malaga of the 5,000 meter run on Sunday (October 20); and the boy from Torrelavega, Mohamed Attaoui, exploded then, running better and faster than ever (1:44.35s, fifth best Spanish time ever), but like Saúl Ordóñez, he just missed the most difficult final to reach, the 800m, even more difficult than finding a free taxi on a rainy afternoon in Seville, as said by Kevin López, stopping outside the gates a couple of times, maximum frustration.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the genius of the amazing Adrián Ben, master of the rhythm and the 800m, shone above all else.
After running like never before (1:43.95 minutes: the fourth Spaniard in history to go under 44 minutes in the two laps of the course) and, as always, qualified for the final (Saturday, 8:30 p.m.), and he did The second Spaniard in history, after Tomás de Teresa, at the 2019 World Cup in Doha and at the 2021 Rio Games, the Galician from Viveiro, like the great storytellers, was able to express his thoughts, tell his dreams, his desires, your love, in 7:38 minutes in front of the recorders of the journalists, who are happy to hear the happiness of the 25-year-old athlete, who just turned 25 and became the European Indoor Champion in March in Istanbul became.
A torrent of emotion and sweat summed up in 1,620 words. Super Saiyan, the hero of Dragon Ball, transformed into a lanky, blonde and talkative jock. Ben, fifth in Tokyo, sixth in Doha, recounts what the midfield sages sum up in one sentence: How clever Adrián Ben, how he got in through the inside!: “Well we’ve passed 400, I think they’re in 48s , 49s will have passed, I will have passed in 50s.” And nothing, I’ve been trying what I’ve been doing all season. Behind, without spending money, on the first street. I was just watching Kramer [veterano sueco, un seguro] And I didn’t think of anything else. He just said run, run, run, run, I wasn’t paying attention to my 500 pace, my 600 pace, nothing. I saw people move, they started to slow down and I still had legs. I tried to move a little, but I didn’t want to go to Calle 3. I stayed behind Barontini [italiano]. I tried to go in and got to 100 and say look I’m done I can spend what I need. And I saw this Hoppel [estadounidense] and Wanyonyi [keniano] As they left, Wanyonyi opened up a bit… And there was a moment when I hesitated, 60, 50 in front of me, when I said wait, I have no place to go through and I’m staying a fool here. But hey, I saw Hoppel open up at the end and he could have gone through the middle or inside like I tried. And 1.43, damn, sorry. Everything, I don’t know what to say, it feels like a story to me, I don’t know, it feels like a movie to me. They take me in like they say now, right? They take me in.”
In Saturday’s final there will be a mature Adrián Ben polished by Moratalaz coach Arturo Martín, a master at the art of getting his athletes at 100 percent at H-hour on D-Day. And his head is always so well placed it inspired him, like Noah Lyles, in the manga, in Super Saiyan and in One Piece, his favorite series. “It’s very different from my first final in Doha in 2019. I was a kid then [21 años recién cumplidos] in its first absolute internationality as who says,” he says. “And now I’m here. And in One Piece there’s an image, a phrase that I’ve repeated a million times. I don’t know if anyone here sees it, but they say that if you want to be world champion, you can’t be afraid of a semi-final. I want to dream big, I want to achieve big things.
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