The javelin thrower who sees the world through a Coke bottle

2023-06-18 17:06:07

BarcelonaHéctor Cabrera lives with the constant feeling of seeing through a Coca-Cola bottle. They are just shapes, silhouettes, colors and blurred elements. It is Stargardt’s syndrome, a degenerative visual disease, for the moment with no cure, which ends up with complete loss of vision. Cabrera doesn’t make out people’s features when he walks down the street, they’re just blurred faces. Nor can he clearly see a restaurant’s menu if there is no QR code that allows him to enlarge the text on his mobile phone, nor can he distinguish transport times. “They ask me if I can’t see the screen. And I say no, I don’t see her”, he explains. But this has not stopped him from being a Paralympic athlete and, at the age of 29, having achieved bronze at the 2021 Tokyo Games, silver at the 2019 Dubai World Championships or gold at the European Championships in Swansea in 2014 in the javelin throw .

Cabrera was the typical kid with glasses who went to class and played with his friends. He was hiking, swimming and cycling. He has always been a big sports fan. At the age of 5 he was playing football in his hometown, Oliva, in the Valencian region of La Safor, and his problem was not precisely due to eyesight problems, but because he did not fully understand his role within the team. “When he was a goalkeeper and the opponent arrived, he stood aside and let him score because he said that if he had already defeated the whole team it was not fair that he stopped the ball”, remembers Vicent Gosp, his childhood friend. When I was 9 years old everything changed. Hector was getting very close to the television, he couldn’t see it well from the couch and his mother noticed. Something wasn’t right. That is why the woman decided to take her son first to Alicante and then to Barcelona and Madrid to be examined by specialists in ophthalmology. After months and months of searching for a reliable diagnosis, Hector came face to face with Stargardt syndrome.

If an eleven-year-old boy is told that he’s going to travel to different cities for a couple of days, he thinks it’s funny because he’s going to make a bell at school. In the case of Cabrera, however, the dynamic became a constant of injections, wires in the head, stays in nursing homes and visits to all kinds of doctors. Suddenly, after the odyssey of medical disappointments, an experimental treatment was developed in the USA to cure this disability. However, Hector decided he didn’t want to leave. “I wanted to go to class, and it’s strange for a child to say that. I had a totally normal life, although from another point of view, I didn’t want to be a lab rat. Today there is still no cure, I would have spent 18 years being the guinea pig for nothing”, he assures ARA.

At that point, and while his sight was fading, he started again and discovered athletics thanks to the Valencia Campus of the ONCE and his coach, Julio Santo Domingo, who discovered him in a camp of sports organized by the association and convinced his family to go to Valencia to train. “He had very interesting abilities, he was very valuable”, says the technician.

Throwing, running and aiming. The legend explains that in Ancient Greece, men demonstrated their worth and talent by measuring themselves against others through these sports disciplines. Who knows whether because of this or because of the comics and movies of Asterix and Obelix, Cabrera discovered the javelin discipline and fell in love with it. “He started athletics; I left some balls for him to practice at home. Then he presented himself in a javelin championship, and if everyone threw 30 or 40 meters, he reached more than 50. From then on I knew that Héctor had the arm made for the javelin”, recounts Santo Domingo .

The javelin became another element of his body, and Hector had the same obsessions that Leo Messi can have with his sneakers: “It’s an extension of my arm, I know what kind of wrinkles it has, it defines me. I spend between three and four hours training, and one to two more with the javelin. When I lost it on the plane while going to a championship, I didn’t know where to put myself.”

The trainings, the trips and the competitions made him feel the adrenaline of the sport again. He spent many hours on the tracks and circuits, but that didn’t stop him from finishing high school and enrolling in college to study physical activity science. There were tables large enough for exams printed in DIN-A3 and Arial font 20. Without realizing it, Hector embodied the maxim that having a disability does not erase the opportunity to have a normal life. “I always like to joke that, apart from being handsome and sexy, I have a disability, I have something more than all of you, the only thing that limits me is driving, but I looked for a girlfriend by car”, he says between laughs

At the age of 21, life took a 180-degree turn, to the point of taking up elite sport. Swansea, Roseto, Dubai… Hector was becoming one of the youngest emerging Paralympic athletes. But his was not a road of roses, there were also obstacles, such as for example injuries: a herniated disc and another inguinal one, and the hardest of all, the rupture of the cruciate ligament of the knee in 2020, in a contest in Pamplona. A competition that was supposed to mean the revalidation of the classification for Tokyo 2021 ended up causing a bitter surgical operation and that the young athlete was out of the tracks for more than seven months. “You want to throw, but your foot doesn’t respond and that frustrates you. The body wants to exert force, but the head stops it”, he explains, helplessly.

The pandemic also aggravated his physical and mental state, to the point of wanting to give up the Tokyo Games. When you’re at the bottom, it’s hard to get back up. His family, as always, went to the Japanese city to encourage him to take a risk, and the risk resulted in his resurgence: bronze. “Héctor always wanted to win, so he showed that if he could, everyone could”, explains his friend Vicent.

Now, the World Championships in Paris await him this July to break this eternal hiatus since he underwent a second operation after the Tokyo Games. Their goal at the World Cup is to secure a place for the 2024 Paris Games and continue to be the paradigm of what is extraordinary.