The way she spreads her arms, pauses, claps until everyone follows her, right down to the last row of upholstered seats at Hayward Field. As she lets out a sharp scream. How she talks herself into jumping, which she’s about to make into the pit. As the German triple jump record holder Kristin Gierisch once said, “the board crashes like a pig” as she dashes across the track, seems to get faster with every push-off, with legs that are at least 1.50 meters long. How then, as soon as she sees its vastness, she screams and jumps with happiness. You can already feel that Yulimar Rojas from Caracas has a little more on his shoulders than his own ambitions.
The 26-year-old’s successes are already outshining anything their predecessors have ever achieved, in Venezuela and in general. She won Olympic silver in 2016, since then she has not lost an international championship in which she participated.
She won World Championship gold in 2017, the first in athletics for Venezuela, World Championship gold in 2019, Indoor World Championship gold in 2020 with an indoor world record (15.41 meters), Olympic gold a year ago with an outdoor world record (15.67) , once again indoor world championship gold last time in Belgrade, again with indoor world record (15.74). At that time she jumped exactly one meter (!) further than the second best, and in Eugene too the competition was basically over after Rojas’ second attempt: 15.47 meters, 58 centimeters further than the silver winner Shanieka Ricketts. She would have liked to jump further, Rojas later said, but it was a bit cold and windy in the stadium.
It was the algorithm of a social network that turned her career around
The Venezuelan, however, puts all of this in a larger context anyway. Her medals only mean something to her, Rojas once said, because she knows that she brings joy to the people in her battered homeland: “I believe that we will get up again, through sport. I think it’s great, that one to be the one that makes old and young smile a little.”
Rojas grew up with both the beauty and poverty of her country. She grew up in Anzoategui, in northwestern Venezuela, where some say the coast is like a 100-kilometer Caribbean beach. Her family lived in one ranchito, a house with bricks and a corrugated iron roof. Her father initially did not want her to travel abroad with the junior volleyball teams in which she excelled (Rojas is 1.92 meters tall today). When the selection fell apart due to a lack of coaches, talent scouts took her to track and field. Rojas first tried high and long jump, but was soon allowed to travel. When she competed in the triple jump for the first time in 2014, she broke the national youth record with 13.57 meters. Her family soon no longer lived under a corrugated iron roof.
In the end, she wants everyone in their homeland to discover a little Yulimar Rojas in themselves.
And yet it was a Facebook algorithm that gave her career an important twist. One day, the social network suggested that she befriend the profile of Ivan Pedroso, the long jump Olympic champion and four-time world champion from Cuba. Rojas sent him a message, shortly after Pedroso was their coach. “Fate,” she later said. It was Pedroso who first polished it, “a diamond in the rough”; without him she would never have moved from her beloved homeland to Spain seven years ago, where the training conditions are better and the distances to the competitions are shorter. Pedroso, Rojas said, once told her, “Athletes go through great pain to achieve their goals, but when you achieve them, it’s the greatest feeling in the world.”
Many champions often feel a great emptiness at this moment; they’ve worked so hard for this moment that they forget to enjoy the view on the way there. But someone who carries a nation in his chest, like Rojas, probably sees it differently. In the end, she wants everyone in their homeland to discover a little Yulimar Rojas in themselves. Then she says sentences like: “We need more role models who know what determination means. Who want to improve every day.” Or: “Anyone can achieve their dream if they really believe in it.”
In her own world, when a jumper can get within half a meter of Yulimar Rojas, that’s quite a remarkable achievement.
(Photo: Andrej Isakovic/AFP)
Is this the solution for a country shaken by socialism: motivational speeches that could have come from a US self-improvement course? Venezuela’s problems might seem a tiny bit too big for that. For years, politics sunk the country’s oil prosperity into corruption and mismanagement, petrol is scarce, many people can hardly buy food, the corona pandemic still poured petrol into this heap of flames. Six million people are said to have fled the country since 2015 alone.
Rojas tries to counteract this with her means. When she is home, she distributes athletic shoes to children in the poor neighborhoods where she grew up. She fights for the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and queer people, which is not a matter of course in a Catholic country. The most important thing, she says, is to remain humble, “otherwise people will never see what kind of person you are beyond all the medals.” That too is not a matter of course in a business in which some athletes eventually play themselves instead of being themselves.
In any case, Rojas will not stop sending her compatriots at least a little emotional warmth home. You get the feeling that she’s just starting to show off her skills (and her whole, long body), that speed and bounce are only just beginning to flow together. She’s training hard to eventually jump 16 meters, she said in Eugene — a crazy proposition considering the old world record dates back to the deepest anabolic era. But it’s also difficult to disagree when Yulimar Rojas says: “I’m still young, I can still achieve so much.” For you and your country.