Aina Cid and Esther Briz: “Spanish rowing is going to break the Olympic curse in Paris”
Aina Cid and Esther Briz They started rowing together in March of last year. A month later they were competing in their first World Cup and the next they won the bronze in the European. Then the podium would also arrive in the Varese World Cup. “From the beginning it was like two pieces of a puzzle fit together”Cid acknowledges with a broad smile when talking about the couple’s rapid adaptation.
“From the beginning we got along very well and understood each other. That makes it very easy to work together and also, when there are problems, to be able to communicate to overcome them. That connection has been the key“, adds the Amposta shirt, which He discovered this sport when he was 10 years old. He used to practice ballet due to the ‘fault’ of one of his grandmothers, “a dance and arts enthusiast.” But accompanying her father to the veteran rowing competitions at the Club in her hometown put the bug in her body and since she tried it in a summer course she felt that she was good at it and the crush lasts until today.
From the beginning with Esther it was as if two pieces of a puzzle fit together.
Briz, who like Cid studied in the United States with a scholarship as a rower – in the morning he studied Industrial Engineering in Stanford and in Catalonia Sports Sciences in Ohaio -, he swam until he was 10 years old. She tried rowing because her older brother practiced it and she loved it. the atmosphere and being able to see his city, Zaragoza, from the Ebro. He remembers, laughing, the first day he rowed with Aina in the coxless two: “I was coming from the skiff, where you only row with an oar, and I thought: ‘This girl is going to think that I have no idea how to row.’ But then I got on and looked good. I have a good memory,” she confesses, smiling. “Although it wasn’t perfect, you could tell there was something there”adds Cid, who when talking about his partner jokes with her nickname ‘The Goddess of the Sea’. This is how the press baptized her when Briz won her second sea rowing World Cup.
The complicity between them is evident in each response. It seems like they have known each other all their lives but nothing could be further from the truth. The woman from Zaragoza, who is six years younger than Aina, had rowed with her sister, but never with her. “We went from zero to a hundred in no time,” they say, because now they only separate to take a nap and sleep at night.
They train six days a week in the Rowing Federation Center in Banyoles (Gerona). Their routine begins at 8:30 a.m. and they combine the double rowing session with the ergometer, the gym and the physio. They recognize that when the wind comes from the starboard side they don’t like it too much because it is not one of the conditions that best suits them, but when there are days like this they say: “There is Paris”, alluding to the one that is going to blow at the Vaires Nautical Stadium. Sur-Marne, Olympic venue for both rowing and canoeing. And motivation increases.
Cannon and shot
Cid, who finished sixth in Rio 2016 with Anna Boada and also in Tokyo 2020 with Virginia Díazfaces its third Olympic event with the main objective of “show what we are worth and what we are capable of”. And he adds: “We would like to win a medal. It has always been in our plans, from the beginning, but it is important to focus on performance.”
At the Paris Games we are going to do our best regatta, we will give 101 percent
In the case of breeze, what debuts in some Games, do you agree. “We are going to do our best regatta. We will give 101% and let it take us to whatever it takes us,” she says.
Both are competitive to the maximum and they complement each other very well. Briz is very methodical and Cid knows perfectly how he is going to react in each situation. Of Amposta, her partner highlights her “great emotional maturity and that she is one of those people who when they decide they are going for something, they go to death. For some reason the coach and I we call it Perdigónbecause when it goes I am a cannon,” says La Maña, laughing.
Since Alejandro Climent and Luis María Lasúrtegui won silver in the coxless two in Los Angeles ’84, Spain has not been on the Olympic podium in rowing again. A slab that is remembered every Olympic edition. “This year that barrier will be broken and, finally, we will win another Olympic medal,” says Briz with conviction. “The curse,” says Cid, who is “sure that it will end and some rowing medal will fall.” If it were theirs, they would be the first for Spanish women’s rowing.
Spain will have five boats in Paris. In addition to Cid and Briz, Jaime Canalejo and Javier García Ordóñez in men’s coxless two, Caetano Horta and Dennis Carrecedo in light double sculls, Aleix García and Rodrigo Conde in double sculls and Virginia Díaz in Skiff will also seek to end the drought.
