“I remember the Olympic Games with absolute pressure and a backpack full of stones”

The former Spanish karateka Damián Quintero remembers the Tokyo Olympic Games, where he achieved silver in the kata modality, with “absolute pressure” and with a backpack “full of stones” due to the burden that his medal was “safe”, although he does not hide his happiest moment in his sports career was the gold in 2023 in the World Series.

“I remember the Tokyo Olympics with absolute pressure. When I put on the medal and threw away the backpack full of stones I had, I said to myself ‘Thank goodness we got it’. There was a lot of pressure because we were given the label of ‘safe medal’. That was the only thing I had in my head. Then it was a pandemic, there were a lot of sensations and what surrounded me on a sporting level didn’t satisfy me very much either,” said the Olympic runner-up in Tokyo in 2021, where his sport was Olympic for for the first and only time, in an interview with Europa Press.

Quintero remembers that it was arriving in Tokyo and telling himself that he was “alone.” “The mind is so strong, that when I entered that warm-up area at the Budokan, that changed. I said to myself ‘this is my thing, what I know how to do is stand on the tatami doing kata. Why are you going to get nervous?’ And so it was. I remember the competition itself very well. Not everything else,” he recalled after a tribute ceremony at the COE.

A karateka who was able to remain in the elite for more than two decades, something the magnitude of which has now been realized. “I have always been thinking about the result, about another and another medal. Now you are realizing the number of medals, but the legacy that I have been able to leave is what satisfies me the most. Having been a reference for boys and girls, having opened a path, doors that perhaps were closed years ago,” he noted.

Such a long career in which the key has been to “reset the counter to zero.” “It means setting short-term goals and not going beyond a year. I said, ‘well, another European, I have five, but I don’t have six.’ This more or less similar question was answered by Rafa Nadal when they told him how he was motivated at Roland Garros. We always want more because you are involved in that wheel of competition,” he added.

“The turning point was the Olympic silver. I came from a very hard time, I went through the golden age and continued. It is a message for promising young people, they must think that even if they are not in the Games they can achieve it, they can create a brand, get sponsors, be world and European champions. That is what we aspire to now. And if that does not convince you, you are not in the right place,” analyzed the man from Malaga.

“AFTER TOKYO TRAINED IN A CORNER, HE WAS ALMOST DISPLACED FROM THE TATAMI”

As for the best moment of his long career, Quintero is clear that it was in 2022 and 2023, when “people seem to leave you aside in the CAR.” “We had a fairly wide tatami and I trained in a ‘little corner’, I was almost displaced from that tatami. Me. It sounds strange, but that’s how it is,” he stressed.

“Together with my coach José Alburquerque, in the first tournament, we won the first gold medal on a world circuit. For me, that medal is much more valuable than the World Championship. The 32 best in the world were there, not just all those who go to the world countries. And at 40 years old we had the best season of my life. I remember that season more than perhaps the simple fact of saying I won a medal in the Games,” claimed the two-time world champion.

A sporting life full of successes in which Damián Quintero highlights having known how to surround himself “with a good team.” “I was the first to get sponsorship in the world of karate in terms of the ‘karatekin’, the suits that we wear. You are opening those doors that perhaps at that moment you do not realize, because you are immersed in achieving yours. But the least expected day, as it is today, you realize what you have opened, what you have done for your sport and for other people. I hope you are grateful,” he warned.

As for the future, he sees himself, despite his career as an aerospace engineer, “linked to karate” and “not as a coach.” “I think I see myself as a manager, within the Spanish or World Federation. I can contribute my experience in those areas. In the end, they are people who have been directing for many years and have directed very well, but perhaps updating things is good, as well as listening to people who have been on the tatami,” he concluded.