Queralt Castellet: “Silver represents a before and after”

This year, although you have to do a memory exercise to go back to February, it was an Olympic year. Of Winter Games. And far away, in the Genting Park of Zhangjiakou, near Beijing, Queralt Castellet stood on the podium to collect silver in snowboard halfpipe that rewarded his genius and his perseverance, in those who were already his fifth Games. From nothing of a specialty that has opened a gap in Spain, to the maximum. Only the American megastar Chloe Kim could with her. For this reason, she was deserving of the Olympic AS Award.

“The medal has meant a before and after for me,” acknowledges the 33-year-old rider from Sabadell, who hides dynamite in her small and light body and the competitive spirit of the greats. Accustomed to being away from Spain for most of the year, appearing on the front page of the newspapers and occupying minutes on television and radio seemed impossible to her. But it is the magic of the Games. “The medal was very important to me, I wanted it, but I didn’t know how important it could be given outside of my snowboarding environment. I was quite impressed,” he explains.

Queralt got the fifth medal for the Spanish winter sport. First it was the genius Paco Fernandez Ochoa (gold in Sapporo 1972. Later, his sister Blanca Fernandez Ochoa (bronze in Albertville 1992). Of the two skiers, to the snowboard cross with regino hernandez (bronze in Pyeongchang 2018) and the figure skating of Javier Fernandez (bronze also in Pyeongchang). “In terms of getting help, the medal gives you more visibility,” admits the Catalan, who does not want to get off the wave.

“I’ll get to the next Games. After? We’ll see…” he laughs. In Beijing she was the oldest of the competitors, in a sport where it is easy to see almost teenagers occupying the podiums. The next appointment is that of Milan-Cortina d’Ampezzo, near Turin, where he made his debut at just 16 years old in Turin 2006. “I was in a cloud there, freaking out all day because I was on the same date list as girls I had on posters on my bedroom walls. They were my heroes and heroines, my role models,” she says. There he fell in love with the mystique emanating from the five rings. And she hasn’t stopped until she has a place in her history.

She was always among the favorites, but for one reason or another the Games had resisted her and her best position was seventh in Pyeongchang 2018. “The truth is that I arrived in Beijing with everything against it,” Queralt reveals. At Christmas he had been in Sabadell visiting his parents and contracted COVID. Her trainer, American Danny Kaas, caught the virus the day before traveling to China and she found herself there alone. But that was not an obstacle. “Unfortunately, I have always been very alone. I wish I could have had a strong team in my country… But it is what has touched me and along the way I have known how to surround myself with people. It is the culture of snow. Workouts with partners lead you to have fun, to challenge yourself, and it’s nice,” she says.

And it is that the girl who was going to be a gymnast got hooked on the tables very early. Her parents, Josep and Inés, were among the first crazy people in the snow. Every weekend they took Queralt and his brother Josep (five years older and also an international rider until 2012) to Andorra. “It didn’t fail! Whether the weather was good or bad, we would go to the caravan that we still have at the campsite. At the age of 13 I already began to compete with a 110 centimeter board (a Morrow that they still have, bigger than her) and the podiums fell one after another. From there to a modernization program that combined training and studies in Puigcerdá and to travel around the world”, recounts her story Queralt.

“I don’t have a home,” he says. The last ‘bases’ of him are between Austria and Colorado stations (Cooper Mountain, Aspen…). “After the Games I have allowed myself to spend more than a month in Spain and it was something that I had not done for years,” he admits. “I didn’t step on a pipe either (the half tube of ice about 220 meters long and 22 wide in which you descend from wall to wall, rising several meters to perform tricks) until I started preparing for the season. I have disconnected, in the snow but doing other disciplines, which in turn helps me improve in mine”, she recounts. She even dares with skateboarding. “There I hit it much more!”, he exclaims.

On his immediate horizon is the start of the World Cup, where Queralt has already accredited 17 podiums. And, above all, the February World Cups in Bakuriani (Georgia). “If gold doesn’t fall this year, it will fall next year”, brave bet. It is the color that is missing after the silver of 2015 and the bronze of 2021.

All competitions that you will have to prepare, as always, outside of Spain. Here there are only two pipes, the one in Sierra Nevada and La Molina, but due to the cost of their maintenance they are only enabled for large competitions. This is how difficult it is to make a quarry. “Hopefully some heiress will come from behind,” wishes the magician from Sabadell. For now, she promises to continue drawing tricks with her board. The same ones that made her an Olympic runner-up.