More sport | ‘Eternal Jesus Rollán’: the book about the legendary goalkeeper who did not know how to live out of the water

On March 11, 2006, at the Blancafort Center in La Garriga (Barcelona), Jesús Rollán decided to commit suicide. Life outside the water weighed too heavily on him. No one prepared him for it. She was only 37 years old. Twenty months earlier he had retired at the Athens Games weighed down by injuries that accompanied him throughout his successful sports career, with more than 600 international matches and a historic string of medals. Rollán was world champion (1996) and runner-up (1992), double champion (1998 and 2001) and runner-up (1991 and 1994), double European club champion (1996 and 2003) and icon of the legendary team that won it all for a decade. Above all, he was a guy who collected all the love that he was giving. A limitless generosity that sometimes was not reciprocated.

This Thursday, May 19, ‘Jesús Rollán eternal’ goes on sale, the first book that reviews his life and explains his death, written by journalists Francisco Ávila (Agencia EFE) and Alberto Martínez (Diario AS) and edited by Córner (16 €.90). The authors have conducted more than 50 interviews to reconstruct a life from a movie, sporting successes and personal tragedies, encounters and some disagreements, where everything revolves around the considered best goalkeeper in the world and “indispensable” to achieve all the sporting successes of that team led by Manel Estiarte. But beyond the portrait of Rollán, the book is an x-ray of the sport of the time. From a generation that was forgiven everything outside the pool if the results came. Nothing mattered more than the medals with the horizon of the 1992 Barcelona Games ahead. And some, Rollán among them, paid too dearly for it.

A WINNING CHARACTER, A GIFT OF SPORTS

Jesus’ childhood took place in Aravaca (Madrid). As a child he practiced several sports and he stood out in all of them, he even received an invitation to enter the Real Madrid soccer academy (later he would have a parrot that received visitors with the cry of “Hala Madrid!”). But by then the man from Madrid was already clear that he wanted to be a water polo goalkeeper, a sport that he discovered thanks to a cousin. There, at the Modernization Center of the Madrid Swimming Federation, he met Miki Oca, Chava Gómez or Pedro García Aguado, who later became his teammates in the National Team. Also the raiding colleagues of him. Their coach, Mariano García, a technician who took them to the Valley of the Fallen and who made them cut logs with an axe, was key in their sporting and personal training.

At just 18 years old, he signed for CN Catalunya and lived at Blume. The accommodation for athletes in Barcelona that became a continuous party. He only went to class at the institute on the first day and lived a youth in which he combined hard training with the debauchery of the center, where there was no control. With the arrival of Dragan Matutinovic to the national team, Spain began to climb the podiums. His training was wild and he made glue in a selection that began to carburize. World silver (1991) and Olympic (1993). Joan Jané took the witness and began the golden age. Rollán became the best in the world and won gold at the Atlanta Games with a magnificent performance.

KINDNESS, DRUGS AND THE INFANT

“Jesus Rollán gave everything for others”, his companions explain in the book. One of the examples occurred in December 1996 when the goalkeeper donated his gold medal in an Antena 3 Telemarathon. Two million pesetas (12,000 euros) were raised, in an unusual decision at that time and that surprised everyone except his acquaintances, who already knew about the personality of Jesus. Precisely in that autumn his encounters with the Infanta Cristina de Borbón also take place, a fun friendship that finally led to the future link between the Infanta and Iñaki Urdangarín.

After that sporting success, the one in Atlanta, Jesús Rollán began a cocaine use that generated an addiction that he was able to control during his sports career, where he continued to achieve successes such as the world championship in 1998 and 2001. The anti-doping controls of the time did not help detect benzoylecgonine, the substance that generates this drug. The goalkeeper was not the only member of that team who had problems outside the pool. But whoever wants to look for morbidity in the pages of the book, he will not find them. A success.

WITHDRAWAL AND DEPRESSION

After spending two magical years in sports in Recco (Italy), where Rollán was chosen as the best player in Europe, in the Italian league and was champion of Europe, he lived a very complicated last season at CN Sabadell, where injuries and problems They began to take him away from the pool. Everything gets worse after withdrawal. The goalkeeper lived 20 months of therapies and different treatments, far from water polountil he had to be admitted to La Garriga, where he decided to end his life precisely on the day he was discharged from the center.

His teammates, rivals, family and sports world point out that Jesús Rollán was, perhaps, the best goalkeeper in the world in his time. But everyone agrees that he was even a better person. Her portrait deserved a book. She already has it.