The Devil and Mr. McGrath | Paris 2024 Olympics

Perhaps to give special meaning to his daily practice, the great Robert Korzeniowski spoke about the mystery of walking, about the constant need for the athlete to keep one foot on the ground, about his various contacts with nature and about many walkers, like Johan Diniz, that’s how they felt it, a kind of madness, like a four-time Olympic champion, and talked about it.

Paul McGrath is not one of them. “I go because I like to win,” says the Catalan athlete (22, Gava, Barcelona). “Mystique? No. I give the march the value that an athlete can give to the sport he loves, the value that a tennis player gives to tennis: sacrifice, dedication.” He says that because he and his two younger sisters couldn’t sit still at home, their mother enrolled them in after-school sports. He wanted soccer, but there was no women’s team, and so that the three of them could be together, he chose track and field, the only sport in which men and women train together, at the same time, sharing classes and coaches, and that’s how the course came together. Is there a Corpus Christi festival in Cornella on a hot May day, when photos are taken and interviews are conducted. Dozens of young people train at the Athletic Club of Cornella. Long-distance runners, hurdlers, jumpers like Jaime Guerra, the Spanish long-distance champion (8.17 m), and walkers, and McGrath is photographed with the phenomenal young Sofia Santacreu. “I was doing track and field and I didn’t win many competitions, and it was funny because when I did my first running competition, I came fifth, and at nine years old I said, ‘If I come fifth without training or anything in this difficult event, if next year I try to get some training at a technical level and things like that, we’ll see how it goes.’ And at 10 years old I became the champion of Catalonia.”

McGrath may be understating it when he says he loves winning. More likely, he hates not winning. “In the background, it’s very mental, very psychological,” he says. “Having gone through so many hardships on my own, without any help, I’m gradually, in competitions, able to say no to that inner demon that suddenly pops into your head and says, ‘Hey, leave this, no.’ ‘We need to move on, third place is good.’ It’s still there, but I fight it and I can make those nagging thoughts go away, the worst thing that can happen.”

He doesn’t have a psychologist, but he does have a 45-minute conversation with Imanol Ibarrondo, trainer thinking in numbers. “He gave me advice and a book so I could read and write down my thoughts every night while I did my homework,” he says. “He’s very busy, and levelwith the football players in San Diego, but he helped me even though he had no budget. And he gave me his book. He is a wise man who has had a great influence on me.”

Nothing new, apparently. What champion doesn’t care only about winning? After all, in the world of athletics, everyone tells the same story: if you’re very good at school, very fast, very skilled, you play football; if you’re only good at running, you go to track and field, and there the rankings are the same: the best, the sprinters, then the middle-distance runners, the long-distance runners, and finally the walkers. And they decorate their verdict with epic images of athletes physically destroyed after covering 20 kilometers in less than 80 minutes. A vivid image of effort, of suffering. “We’ll see,” explains McGrath, who is over 1.80 meters tall, who was initially annoyed by his height because he thought it would be difficult to walk, but then he saw that the profile had changed, that the Swede Carlström, the same one who beat him in Rome, was two lengths ahead of him, since Alvaro Martin is the same height, and he was reassured. “As for the Instagram photo, it’s nice to look there, ruined and broke. But no, I don’t like that. The truth is, I try to put on anti-wrinkle creams, sunscreen, etc., so that when I’m done, I don’t look like I’m 40.”

But it is not McGrath, with his bright green eyes, the emeralds of naivety on his dark face, who could have competed as an Irishman but chose Spain, the most difficult route to success as a pedestrian, the most difficult route, so dense is the history and reality of the Spanish March. “We are the Kenya or Ethiopia of the March,” he says. The Catalan with the Irish surname, studying journalism at Pompeu, believes in it so much and is so brave. García Bragado, Llopart, Marín, Massana, Miguel Ángel López, before. Álvaro Martín and María Pérez, now two-time world champions. And it is so difficult even to be part of the Olympic team in Paris, with the disappearance of the long distance, the long 50 kilometers for TV, replaced by a mixed relay of 42 distances in four stages. “You know, to be the best in the world, you have to beat the best Spaniards. And I knew it from my first international competitions. My grandparents are Irish, as is my father, who met my mother when they were both working in Glasgow, and she told him that if he wanted something more than the romance of Scotland, he should come with her to Barcelona. He came for love in ’92, and from that love, 10 years later, I was born. It was the best decision of his life. He misses Celtic, but he always has Van Morrison on the turntable, remembering its fogs. If I had chosen Irish citizenship, I would have travelled to every possible international event from the age of 15. And definitely to the World Cup in Budapest. But I knew already at 15 or 16 that if I qualified with Spain for any international championship, I would have succeeded. Because the fight to get into one of those two or three positions is greater than any other country. And it’s the same for the Games. As for the Games, imagine that Miguel Angel Lopez, the world champion, was left out.”

He admires the Murcian from Llano de Brujas, so was thrilled as a child to see him win the World Championships in Beijing. He got goosebumps the day he shook hands with his idol, Ecuadorian Jefferson Perez, the 1996 Atlanta Olympic champion. “I’m a bit of a Jefferson fan and it was a dream come true when I shook his hand at the World Championships. Mir and I were able to tell him how much I admire him.” He’s also a fan of walking for hours and analysing videos of his training in search of “perfection” to spot technical errors. “March is cheap. You can start with a few sneakers and any T-shirt. But to be in the elite, you need to go to a more technological level. I’m making a small investment to see if they come into effect on August 1 at 7:30 next to the Seine, between the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower. “I bought an ice vest,” he says. “And I have a good nutrition plan. Every kilometer water, and then salts and gels. Carbohydrate gels are now a must. To run 1 hour 17 minutes, you need to constantly put energy into your body. Non-stop gels, drinks with salts… The last five kilometers, four kilometers, the body does not want any carbohydrates, does not want any gels, the stomach is closed, so we should already have a pretty good superstorage of energy carbohydrates for the last kilometers.”

Training at 7pm because his coach, Alejandro Aragoneses, couldn’t do it earlier, when the athlete wavered between throwing the javelin, because he had a good arm, and marching, and his physical constitution urged him to march. He can’t train earlier because he needs a paid job – as a technician in a waste management company – to be able to dedicate himself, almost as a volunteer, with virtually no financial reward, to improving one of the greatest talents in Spanish athletics. “That’s how most coaches in Spain treat the great Olympic athletes. I earn a little from the club, but it’s not enough to live on. And then I have to dig deep into my pockets to go to competitions or training camps,” says Aragoneses, who visited his student in the Sierra Nevada a couple of times in May and used his vacation to spend three weeks with him in July. in Font-Romeu, finalizing his preparations. “My wife is also a coach and understands this, but there will come a time, and not too late, when we will not be able to resist such a life, training out of pure voluntarism and because, of course, you are also happy to be the coach of an Olympian.”

If you’re not a mystic and a little allergic to epics, McGrath is something of a mythomaniac, with a round number in his head: 100 miles, 165 kilometres a week, trained at five minutes per kilometre. “I train in Gava, where I have a whole track on the beach, I also have orchards, the canals of the Delta… a gorgeous, idyllic place to do kilometres and kilometres, and then for a few days I go to the Cornellà circuit here. I do 80% of the kilometres there. 140, 150 a week,” he explains. “I’m not there yet, I want to get there, I’m close, but walking, which is slower than the runners, we’re walking about five minutes per kilometre, let’s say, when the runners are doing four, that’s hours, a lot of it.” He trains alone, in his bubble, in his thoughts, and at best agrees to have a family member accompany him on his bike, giving him something to chat about and drink.

The kid who sulked and became unbearable when he didn’t win is now a mature young man. He won’t break if he doesn’t win a medal in Paris, but he will always hate it if he doesn’t.

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on Facebook And Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.