Yulimar Rojas is the living example that what we desire and work to achieve can be achieved.
From a humble family, stimulated by the Venezuelan participation in the 2008 Beijing games, she was interested in practicing volleyball because her size would help her, she wanted to be a spiker and with that in mind she went to the sports center to join the training for that discipline, but she found that there were none and they were only available for athletics.
She did not give up, but took on the challenge of training in high jump and at the age of fifteen she won the discipline in the National Games held in Lara and in 2011 she won the gold medal in the South American Youth Track and Field Championship with a mark of 1.78 meters.
She not only practiced this discipline but also hurdles and long jump and while she continued to achieve success as a high jumper, she won the 100 meter hurdles in the 2012 student games and sixth in the long jump in the 2013 Bolivarian Games.
His passion was unbelievable, his joy overflowed and he was noticed at every rally, his gift for people won him friends and even his fiercest rivals enjoyed his witticisms.
Already in 2015 at the National Championships she was consecrated as the best jumper in the country and won the long jump and triple jump and at the age of 19 she was already continental champion in the latter.
With six siblings and a father who was a boxer, no one like her to know what it meant to fight for the rewards and her privileged height of 1.92 plus her perseverance led her to conquer the world that is at her feet and waiting for the extraterrestrial, as many journalists call her, to break the 16-meter mark in the triple jump.
Aware of the limitations in his country to train at the highest level, he went to Guadalajara, Spain, to train under the orders of Cuban Ivan Pedroso and began his journey to the heights, focusing on the triple jump.
Her first Olympic medal was silver and she obtained it in the 2016 Rio Olympics with 14.98 and from then on she would improve her marks in each competition, her first outdoor world championship in 2017 beating the Colombian Caterine Ibargüen, who had beaten her in Rio.
He would follow the golden one at the Pan American 2019 improving his mark to 15.11 meters, a week later in Andujar he achieves one of 15.45 the second longest in history and after the world championship in 2019 in Qatar, he covers himself with glory by breaking the Olympic and world mark at the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 by imposing a 15.67 that for the experts seemed impossible.
His triumph shook the foundations of sport in Venezuela and was felt as his own by every inhabitant who cried when the national anthem was sung and heard through the TV screens.
She became the first woman from her country to win an Olympic gold medal and the third athlete to do so.
When the experts had not come out of the surprise of the record the Venezuelan a year later in Belgrade broke it again imposing a 15.74 that she promised herself to overcome again at another time.
Few see what is behind every achievement of an athlete, the sacrifices she makes, the obstacles she must overcome and in the case of this woman whom some associate with chavismo and denigrate in social networks taking as an excuse her sexual preferences and any nonsense.
She is the living example of a woman fighter and achiever and is an example to be followed by all women of her gender.
It will take a long time for another athlete in the specialty in the world to reach those levels and there is still a long way to go and she is proudly Venezuelan, a nationalist and an example of a country that constantly fights every day.
