“I am Álvaro Robles, of table tennis,” Álvaro tells the security manager of the High Performance Center (CAR) to open the lathes. “They come with me,” he adds pointing to the journalist and the photographer. It's Friday, it's five in the afternoon and except in the Badminton pavilion, there is no soul in the facilities. Álvaro carries the keys to access the table tennis room in the hands: the freshest place of the CAR, as it is in a kind of basement under the athletic track of athletics that are accessed by lowering scalars. Outside it must make 10 degrees more.
There are eight bright blue tables and the red slope red; Colors chosen to differentiate from the ball that is white. Álvaro (Huelva, 30 years) lights all the lights and teaches what is his casa For three years. The CSD built this space of 750 square meters per effort of the Spanish athlete that has just been classified for Tokyo games. Before, the players trained in a multi -purpose area in which they had to remove and put the tables every day and without the ideal lighting. Robles is the third Spanish – not nationalized – that is classified for the Olympic appointment after Alfredo Carnero (Beijing 2008) and Carlos Machado (London 2012).
“I have been a headache for the Federation … sometimes they listened to me and many not,” he says, recognizing that he became very heavy with this issue. He did so that the collection of talents was done with time and for the young people who begin to have the right place to develop, grow and improve. He had to go to Germany with 21 years, with nothing in his pocket and without knowing a word of German. Germany is the Promised land For any table tennis player, one of the leading countries in this sport. Álvaro left there to be a professional player; Otherwise, I would not have arrived. Due to lack of infrastructure, classmates and work system. Since he left, he says, there was not a single day that he did not wake up thinking about his dream: qualify for the games. He has achieved it in a sport that has 12,570 licenses (20 years ago they exceeded 5,000).
He landed in Ochsenhausen, a small town of 8,000 inhabitants in Bavaria. He made pineapple with a Croatian, French, English, Brazilians. “All of us who were there, were with the same goal.” Improve. 7,000 euros was the annual cost of the center. He won the first year 300 euros per month … the minimum wage (20,000) began to collect it when he went up to the First Division League. “It cost me a lot at the beginning to feel part of that group because it was the worst, there were people of a lot of level, much more than mine. There was even a Korean who had been an Olympic champion in Athens 2004. I was out of place and it cost me two years to feel part of that group. I stayed six years there, from the third was the milk,” he says in the deserted room of the CAR at 5 in the afternoon. He vaccinated in the morning and the physical trainer advised him to rest a couple of days so that the immune system, which already fights against the bugdo not weaken.
“In Germany it was one more”
Who helped him not throw those first two years? “A coach with whom I still have in touch, was my guide there. I had the ability to read my mind and at every moment I told me just what I needed for that moment. I found the key. I wondered: 'What is your identity? I made you think, I wanted me to take confidence who I was, where I came from and because I was there,” he replies. “Everyone else had shirts from their sponsorI had no sponsor, I was going to train with what I had. He threw contacts and got me a lot and gave them to me. I took me to eat, listened to me. I value what he did because the former were years without results, they were years of only work and training, of trying to occupy a position, of making me a place. The results have arrived in these last 3-4; The others were to be a little lost, of a lot of search, for trial-error, of not knowing where to throw. And when things are already going well, it seems that bad things are erased, I don't know why, ”he reflects.
He learned technique and tactics based on work, hours and hours of training, without anyone explaining that it was an “effort investment”, as he calls it, and that one day he would collect the fruits. The first reward came in the form of world silver (first Spanish tennis Spanish who succeeded) in doubles in 2019. and has also arrived in the form of Olympic classification. This cycle has almost completely prepared in the CAR of Madrid.
“In Germany I had an intensive training, to soak up everything. But there was one more, I They used To put it somehow. It was a sparring For good players there. The goal of coming to Car de Madrid was to use here in my favor everything I learned there, ”he explains at the same time that he ensures that in Germany, for example, there were no physios, not a psychologist. He took advantage of each trip to Spain to meet with the sports director of the Federation.
“I was transferred to implement in Madrid everything the improvable that I saw in Germany. In the end for my insistence, ambition and for being very heavy it is being done with the youngest which had been asking for a while. Take them from soon to come to come to a high performance center, teach them that the principle is hard, that they have to combine it with the studies and that they do not have time for anything else. of what awaits them, to at least know what there is.
Álvaro, who will be a father in September, says he has been since he has been taking a month of vacation since the age of 15. The biggest whim that is granted is to disconnect 2-3 days after very intense months of training. “To reset, so that the body regenerates because if the machine does not start not working, you physically start not being so precise, the demand cannot be followed and mentally burned.”
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