He doesn’t lose track of where he held the last conference or where the next one takes him, he never forgets to say thank you or smile. She makes the difficult easy. This is a risk, I warn you, because people get used to you always solving the most adverse challenges and end up underestimating your effort. It happens like to Rafa Nadalthat the more the match was against, the closer victory seemed. However, the fight of Teresa Perales She is titanic, let us not forget it no matter how many medals she adds to her medal table.
We spent a freezing morning at the UNICEF headquarters. The oldest ambassador versus the youngest. I tell myself that one day the surname Viejo would have to come true, otherwise what a joke. The idea of ​​confronting two goodwill ambassadors of the United Nations Children’s Agency It came up at the same time and we took advantage of it right away.
We recorded a radio interview, a networking campaign and caught up. The first thing he comments, as if the feat were most natural, is that That morning he had to ride through the streets of Zaragoza with her chair because the taxi that was supposed to pick her up to take her to the station was not adapted and, if she waited for the next one, she would have missed the train. “That’s how I warmed up,” he confesses with a laugh. In fact, he doesn’t stop doing it throughout the day when the torn muscle in his back hasn’t stopped bothering him. Only after insisting does he tell me about his pains, which are not discomforts but a continuous reminder of his courage to move forward. To swim in those pools that have become a symbol of freedom. In a slip of the tongue, she tells me that she spends half the night bent over herself, curled up in a ball, in order to relieve her severe abdominal pain. Those on the left arm, who almost prevented her from participating in the Paris Paralympics, are not silent. But when he mentions the medal he won, which contains part of the steel from the Eiffel Tower where her husband proposed to her twenty years agos, the muscles relax and the pain is silenced. Love and pride, which can do everything.
On her left forearm she wears a leather protector where the logos of the Paralympic Games in which she has participated appear, a symbol of being “almost” unbeatable because Teresa Perales is the Spanish athlete who has accumulated the most medals in our sporting history and the only one capable of equaling the record of swimmer Michael Phelps. If you don’t remind her, forget her Princess of Asturias award because the imposter syndrome sneaks in to warn you that there are other athletes who deserve that recognition as much as she does. Be careful, it is not about false humility, Teresa’s mental machinery is designed to solve, not to gloat in what has been achieved.
That is one of the results of high curious behavior. I explained it to her and she told me that from the first moment she heard the phrase “You will never walk again”, at nineteen years old, her only effort was to find out how to achieve what she wanted if her legs did not accompany her. Using curiosity to solve life’s challenges is a sign of intelligenceof a practical intelligence much more valuable to develop ourselves than that other that reduces the most convoluted mathematical dilemmas. If curiosity is added to the joy of life and a sense of humor, the equation becomes unstoppable.
If curiosity is added to the joy of life and a sense of humor, the equation becomes unstoppable.
UNICEF has brought together two Teresas to spread a necessary message. No matter what moment we are in, childhood will always be our future, but it is not about the planet that we will leave to our children, says Teresa, but about asking ourselves what kind of sons and daughters we want to leave to the planet, appealing to the commitment to co-create the humanity we deserve.
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