To the Rio Olympic Games for only a second

Gonzalo Tellechea is an Argentine triathlete, Olympic in London in 2012, appointment in which he qualified in the last race in May of 2012 in the WTS of Madrid where he got the 16ª place.

If today the classification for the Rio JJOO January Gonzalo would be classified ... by 1 ", more specifically by 3 tenths of a second.

Last Sunday Tellechea finished the Auckland WTS in 33ª position. The competition for him and several other triathletes including his compatriot Luciano Taccone was developed in the following way, they came out in the last swimming group and from that moment they had to work hard in the cycling sector to continue in the race and that the difference with the first group and the second does not increase much, to end with a solid foot race and thus try to enter the 5% cutt-off of the winner to be able to score in the list of ITU points and for the Ranking Olympic.

Winner Jonathan Browlee's time was 1h55'26 '' (6926 seconds), so to score it was necessary to make a time shorter than the winner plus the 5% ie 2h2'12 '', 3 (7272,3 seconds), the time of Gonzalo Tellechea in goal was 2h2'12 '' (7272 seconds) which means it scored by a margin of scarce 3 tenths of a second.

His score was 76 points which allow him to climb to the 43ª of the ITU list and thus obtain a hypothetical place the Olympic Games in the Olympic simulation.

There is still more than a year to go until the classification period for the games is over, so this piece of information will probably remain in an anecdote ... or not, what we want to highlight in this article is the importance of never giving up, of fighting until the end as in this case Gonzalo Tellechea has done and in other situations they will have done others and other triathletes.

"The effort is not negotiated", who strives and gives everything always gets its fruits and if it is not like that, he will always have the certainty of having tried it until the end, and of not achieving his goals it will be because there were other triathletes top.

To end this article we want to send a lot of encouragement to all those triathletes who are traveling and competing for the five continents to try to achieve their classification for the Olympic Games. of Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

Juan José Martí Navío (@jjnavio)

Photos: Jorge Amay and Pilar Valenzuela