This month I celebrate 20 years in EL PERIÓDICO. Who would have thought that, two decades later, I would be on the cover for a book that was born in a report for my newspaper. And I would sign in Sant Jordi with a two-time Olympic champion named Gervasio Deferr, whom I am proud to call a friend.
A year and a half ago I met Gervi for a report for this newspaper. So I knew about him what the majority did: that he had won two Olympic golds and one silver in gymnastics and that they had taken a World Cup medal from him for a joint. What neither I nor almost anyone knew was the tsunami of alcohol and drugs that he had experienced and that had taken him to a detoxification center.
It has survived the gale just as we tried to do this Saturday to sign ‘The Great Jump’, the biography that we have composed four hands.
Although it is my fourth book, it is the first time that I have been signing at Sant Jordi. It’s a strange feeling, accustomed as a journalist to being on the other side of the barrier. But doing it next to Gervi makes everything easier.
It’s amazing to see the love it generates, whether among parents of gymnasts, retired athletes or young people like Ricardo, a Bolivian swimmer who was going to give up his Olympic dream but an interview with Gervi convinced him not to throw in the towel. At the request of little Ada, even she has done a backflip right under our noses.
At one o’clock we started at the FNAC Arenas, the first of the five stalls that awaited us. Adrián, who at the age of 10 saw him win his first Olympic gold, was the first to reach the signing marathon.
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“If he prepared the Games in 6 months, we can wait 40 minutes,” Sergi told us after resisting a long queue under rain and hail at the El Corte Inglés stop. Arriving at the Fabre the storm has loaded the tent but between books and wet cardboard Miguel Ángel Revilla, Cantabrian president, has made room for us.
The bad weather moved the Abacus signature from Passeig de Gràcia to that of Enric Granados. A long jump but nothing compared to what ‘The Great Leap’ has meant for our lives and, we believe, for many others.