Some of the best athletes in history have competed on the stage that will host the Madrid 2025 European Athletics Team Championships.
By Miguel Villaseñor
With an eye on the upcoming European Athletics Team Championships, to be held at the end of June on the green track of Madrid’s Vallehermoso stadium, we begin a journey back in time. In two installments, we will discover 20 legendary athletes who competed on the cinder and rubber tracks of Vallehermoso, in both the old and the new stadium. We will take a chronological tour, highlighting athletes who defined an era in world athletics and whom we were able to watch up close from the stands of the Madrid stadium.
Ralph Boston
60 years ago, on May 14, 1965, the Vallehermoso stadium was filled with 10,000 spectators in the stands. Many international figures competed in that SEU Festival, but among them all, the American Ralph Boston stood out. Boston was a living legend at the time, having surpassed Jesse Owens’ mythical world long jump record of 8.13 meters (set in 1935 and held for a quarter of a century) with a jump of 8.21 meters in 1960. Ralph Boston had broken the world record five more times, the last being 8.34 meters in 1964. Boston’s performance that day in Madrid was magnificent, as can be seen in his series of jumps: 8.12 – foul – 8.16 – 7.99 – 8.28 – 8.09. His 8.28-meter jump was just 6 cm short of his own world record. And note this other detail: the foul jump was measured at a staggering 8.51 meters. Two days later, many of the athletes who had competed in Madrid did so at the Montjuïc stadium in Barcelona, in another great afternoon of athletics. On a novel “rubkor” runway, a kind of primitive synthetic material, Boston achieved a jump of exactly 8 meters.
Colette Besson
At the end of August 1971, a thrilling Spain vs. France meet, for both men and women, was held in Vallehermoso. The French team arrived with all its stars. One of them was the reigning Olympic champion in the 400 meters, the always-remembered Colette Besson. Indeed, Besson was the first Olympic champion to compete in Vallehermoso; she had won her title at the Mexico 1968 Games. In Madrid, she had a fantastic performance, winning with a time of 52.7 seconds; consider that the world record at the time was 51.0. Following Besson was her compatriot Bernardette Martin; both pulled along the Galician Josefina Salgado, who achieved a new Spanish record with 55.4. Colette Besson was a legend, not only in athletics but in French sports. We were able to see her many times in Spain, such as in cross-country races in the Basque Country and on the old indoor tracks of Madrid or Sabadell. She passed away in 2005 at the age of 59 from breast cancer.
Guy Drut
The Frenchman Guy Drut was one of the most promising young hurdlers on the athletic scene in the early 1970s; he was a fine stylist, as they used to say, capable of challenging the formidable American hurdlers in the future. However, at the age of 20, at the European Championships in Helsinki in mid-August 1971, he had fallen after stumbling on the third hurdle in his heat, dashing French hopes, as Drut was one of the favorites for the title. At the end of that month, he appeared in Vallehermoso as part of a powerful French team, eager to redeem himself for his Helsinki fiasco. In that Spain-France meet, on the newly inaugurated tartan track of Vallehermoso, Guy Drut achieved his goal, stopping the clock at a magnificent 13.5 seconds, a high-caliber time never before seen in Spain. The future did indeed bring success to Guy Drut, as he was an Olympic silver medalist in Munich 1972, a gold medalist at the European Championships in Rome 1974, and, above all, the Olympic champion in Montreal 1976, this time defeating the best American hurdlers.
Pietro Mennea
In the final part of his long athletic career, the Italian Pietro Mennea became the Olympic champion in his favorite event, the 200 meters. This was in 1980, at the Moscow Games. At that time, the Italian had already been the world record holder since the previous year; a record he held for 17 years until it was broken by Michael Johnson. Earlier, as a 19-year-old, he competed in Vallehermoso during the World University Festival. Pietro Mennea surprisingly took victory in the 200 meters with a great time of 20.48 (although with an illegal tailwind). The junior Mennea was ecstatic after the race, as he had matched the best time of his idol, Livio Berruti, a legend of Italian athletics. History had a place reserved for Pietro Mennea, as the following year he won bronze at the Munich Olympics, in 1979 he set the world record in the 200 meters, and, as we mentioned at the beginning, in 1980 he was crowned Olympic champion.
Viktor Saneyev
For many years, in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, the Georgian Viktor Saneyev was the best triple jumper in the world. Not for nothing was he a three-time Olympic champion (1968, 1972, and 1976) and a one-time silver medalist (in 1980). In September 1971, he was in Vallehermoso for the World University meet. Saneyev was the world record holder, with 17.39 meters, since the Mexico Games. But in August of that same 1971, a very young and ephemeral Cuban, Pedro Pérez Dueñas, snatched the record from him by just 1 cm. Saneyev came to Madrid with the firm intention of reclaiming the world record. He tried valiantly but did not succeed. It was a competition “in crescendo,” with six valid jumps, and with the crowd that packed Vallehermoso completely captivated. On his last attempt, he reached 17.29 meters, just 11 cm short of the world record. Saneyev would manage to reclaim the world record the following year, in his homeland.
Rosa Mota
We remember many of the athletes we talk about in this article for their great achievements at the Vallehermoso stadium. But now we will talk about an athlete who went completely unnoticed at the time. In June 1975, one of the women’s European Cup qualifiers was held in Vallehermoso, with Spain as the host. In the 1,500 meters race, a 16-year-old Portuguese girl finished last by a wide margin, with a time of 4:55.47. Her name was Rosa Mota. That fragile and petite athlete became, seven years later, the European marathon champion (the first of her three European titles), world champion in 1987, a bronze medalist at the Los Angeles 1984 Games, and the Olympic champion in Seoul 1988. On that day in 1975, watching the very young Rosa cross the finish line, no one would have imagined that she would reach such great heights.
Daley Thompson
The British athlete Daley Thompson is one of the most memorable decathletes in history. And not only for his athletic feats, his titles, and his records, but also for his charisma on and off the track. Few know that a young Daley Thompson, only 18 years old, competed in Vallehermoso in June 1977, on a hot weekend during which a four-way combined events meet was held between Spain, Great Britain, Italy, and Denmark. Thompson’s performance did not go unnoticed, as he set a new junior world record with 8,190 points (8,056 with the current scoring tables), becoming the first under-20 athlete in history to surpass 8,000 points. Thompson remained undefeated in championships or Games for 9 years, being a two-time Olympic champion (1980 and 1984), a one-time world champion (1983), and a two-time European champion (1982 and 1986) in the decathlon.
Ulrike Meyfarth
At the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, a very young 16-year-old athlete from West Germany was crowned Olympic champion in the high jump. Her name was Ulrike Meyfarth, and she also used the then-novel Fosbury Flop style. In 1984, 12 years later, that same athlete, now 28, defended the colors of her club, Bayer Leverkusen, in the European Champion Clubs Cup held in Vallehermoso. She won, as expected, with a good jump of 1.94 meters, 2 cm higher than the mark that gave her the title in Munich. Three months later, in Los Angeles, she was crowned Olympic champion for the second time, 12 years after her first title. Epilogue to this story: the author of this piece jumped onto the Vallehermoso track and, among the crowd of kids surrounding Ulrike, managed to get the champion to sign his autograph on the ticket for that competition—which cost 100 pesetas—a ticket that this author guards like a treasure.
Alberto Juantorena
The Cuban Alberto Juantorena had been a double Olympic champion, in the 400 and 800 meters, at the Montreal 1976 Games. “El Caballo” (The Horse), as he was admiringly called, was always the center of attention. At the II MAM-Galgo Trophy in 1984, we were able to enjoy the enormous stride of a 33-year-old Juantorena in Vallehermoso. He had suffered a serious injury the previous year at the World Championships in Helsinki and was just returning to competition. However, his performance did not meet expectations, as he merely won his 400m race in 47.07. In his defense, it should be said that he had run an 800m in Italy the night before and had arrived in Madrid only a few hours earlier. That year, due to the boycott by communist countries, he could not compete in the Los Angeles Olympic Games. At the end of the 1984 season, Alberto Juantorena announced his retirement from the tracks, beginning a successful career in administration, as a member of the Cuban federation, the IAAF, and the International Olympic Committee. Juantorena has visited our country dozens of times; however, that was his only competition in Spain throughout his entire athletic career.
The 1962 Ibero-American Games
And we end this article at the beginning, not the end. And not with a specific athlete, but with an event that marked a historic milestone for Spanish athletics. With the Vallehermoso stadium almost newly inaugurated, the II Ibero-American Games were held there in October 1962. During those days, the Spanish public packed the stands every day of the competition, which proved too small for the occasion, and was able to enjoy top-level athletics, with all the Spanish and Ibero-American stars of the moment. A very notable fact at the time was that there was a women’s competition, albeit without Spanish athletes participating. Spanish women’s athletics had made a timid return in 1960 and it was still too early to compete with the experienced athletes from the Caribbean and South America. Those Ibero-American athletes were, without knowing it, the definitive boost for Spanish women’s athletics to join regular athletic activity. In Vallehermoso, some of the best marks ever achieved in Spain were recorded, and people could enjoy world-class athletes such as the Puerto Rican pole vaulter Rolando Cruz, the Chilean javelin thrower Marlene Ahrens (Olympic silver medalist six years earlier), the Argentine hurdler Juan Carlos Dyrzka, the Cuban sprinter Miguelina Cobián, and the Venezuelan decathlete Héctor Thomas.
