The Portuguese Ana Cabecinha, who this Sunday reached the qualifying mark for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in the 20-kilometre march, did not hide her joy at the achievement and assures that, to close her career “on a high note, an individual medal is missing”.
“Of course it was going to end big, so I didn’t even think about it, maybe it would end soon.” [a carreira]but gait has evolved a lot, so we have to see a lot, and it will evolve even more, because in the olympic year athletes rarely fail and I hope to be one of those athletes who doesn’t fail and who is in the fight to walk in equal conditions with the medals of the athletes and for that I am going to train”, he confessed to TSF Ana Cabecinha, who was motivated by the 2024 Olympic Games.
The Portuguese athlete says that despite having several European Cups, she has not won “a European or World Championship”, so winning one of these awards is the goal of her career, which, at 39, she says that must be managed “in another way”.
“Because we, from the age of 35, have to manage our career in a different way and we had to manage our career to try to be in Paris. And the race has to be managed in a different way and we surround ourselves with wonderful people. people who have been doing this job so that I can be well at this stage of the season”, explains Ana Cabecinha, who praises her coach, as well as the team that surrounds her, a group to which she says she owes “a lot”. Of what his career is.
“My coach always managed to get me to the big championships in my best form and in my best phase of the season and, in recent years, we have surrounded ourselves with a wonderful team that has done that job so that I can be in good shape. . […] I owe them a lot this race, my last race and my last championships, always entering the top 10”, he defends.
Due to the success of this Sunday, with a time of 01:28.49 hours, which earned her ninth place in the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, the walker from CO Pechão affirms that her Alentejo genes and the fact of living and training “for many years” in the Algarve.
“Being from Alentejo -and the heat is in my genes- and living in the Algarve for many years and used to training in these months -luckily I always prepared for the big championships in July and August-, that makes me adapt very well in the heat, but of course this is all training,” he says.
The 39-year-old athlete, who considers that the fact of training in months where the heat is felt more intensely, also stresses that this Sunday “fortunately there was not much humidity and that helped a lot to make the race better in the final part
Source: TSF
