I Want to Climb Higher

Yarisley does not want to
be obssessed with a certain height..

By Glauber Garcia Lara

Yarisley does not want to be obssessed with a certain height, but she is sure she will get her goal.

It was August 6 in the afternoon and all Cuba was paying attention to two youths from Pinar del Rio. One, majestic, imperial if you like, beat all his rivals without apparent difficulty; the other oner, small, feisty, as competition went on left her rivals behind and increasingly defied the laws of Newton.

Expecting  Mijaín’s gold medal  was not a utopia. However, seeing Yarisley at the podium could be really regarded as an impossible dream; in fact, any Cuban man or women throughout history ha won an Olympic medal in the pole vault.

Yarisley Silva looked in the eye and with her head held high at all her rivals; she did not believe in curriculums or past stories. She flew higher than all, and because of a mistake in the first attempt she could only touch gold. Anyway, silver is just as valuable.

"I never thought I would fail over 4.45 meters. It is a height I master, but they are things that happen in sports. I think I went a bit cold to the competition, but never inattentive; the first scores are to warm up the body and find the rhythm. Unfortunately it could not be then, but as I said, they are things that happen, " explains the also Pan American Champion in Guadalajara 2011.

Small in height when compared to most of her colleagues ― she just reaches 1.70 m―, Yarisley is a strong athlete with  a winning mentality, and bases her success on hard training and a strong psychological preparation.

She says: "Four years ago in Beijing the event was too much for me, I hardly arrived at 4.15 meters. The environment dazzled me, I could not reach the final. Now the story was different, I had more experience and better training and knew that if it came to the final my chances were the same as those of the rest. I respect them all, but I have all the trust put in me, what the others do, do not affect me.”

The psychologist’s work was essential for the athlete in London; she confesses that the night before the dispute for the medals was exciting and she could not sleep.

"I thought about the competition, and repeated again and again the routine. I also did this during the final. I never lost focus, I think that was vital to achieve the medal," Yarisley explains.

In a discipline of such a technical rigor and with several athletes at an even level to achieve a result of that caliber has an added value. Perhaps that is why Yarisley enjoyed so mucb the conquest.

"I can only say that the emotion is incomparable. All the time I felt the support of people who love me: my parents called me several times; my aunt, who introduced me to sports and who I thank a lot; my friends... everyone gave me strength, that is why there were tears at the end. The sacrifice is so much and for so many years..."

At the end of 1997 a little girl from Pinar del Rio, as normal as the rest, walked almost always by kilometre four of the highway to Viñales between school and home. Always restless, and from a humble family, in her short 11 years old she had never heard of poles, not in the least of Bubka and the others.

Isidora, aunt of the small girl, saw something in her that drew her attention and take her to Ormani Arenado Sports School. Yarisley showed there some skills for combined events.

Eventually, the girl managed to speed but she lacked strength in throwings. This seemed to indicate that her career would end soon, until it appeared Nilo and everything changed: "Let's see if she is good for the pole vault, she has conditions ", the coach said.

Yarisley gradually found interesting challenges in pole vault. Each height to beat fired her competitive zeal, and thus, centimetre to centimetre, jump after jump, the champion began to forge herself

She arrived at her first National School Games and won the silver medal with 3.10 meters. Thereafter the ascent was gradual: shr surpassed the hitherto almost impossible Cuban barrier of 4.00 meters in the cadets category, got good results in the World Youth Championship. National marks fell in every competition and everyone saw in her a rough diamond.

Already a member of the national team, under Professor Alexander Navas’s tutelage, she also got a silver medal inher first big international competition: the Central American and Caribbean Gamesin  Cartagena de Indias 2006, and then she was ready for a bigger stage.

The Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro 2007 aimed to provide experience to the young woman of only 21 years old, who by the way was not anymore that girl walking along the highway to Viñales.

The rigors of training sculpted strong muscles, well-formed, but without ever losing that special and unique beauty of Cuban women.

And in a country as nice as Brazil, the beautiful dark-skinned young woman didn't want to lose the pictures: she rose the bar to 4.30 meters, got the bronze medal, and many considered her performance as one of the big surprises of the continental athletics. Clearly, that was the beginning of stardom.

Yarelis contains emotion, pauses, and continues: " I love parties and have fun, as most of young people, and I have to limit myself because of training. I am also a little chubby and I like to eat, if I overdid I get weight immediately and that is another pleasure I enjoy only occasionally. Add to that the daily sun, the lack of proper implements in a good part of my sporting career, the months far from home and Ido not know how many more things. That’s why I say the sacrifice is very big".

After the Olympics, she kept her winning inertia and triumphed at the athletic stop of the Diamond League in Stockholm, later she finished second in Birmingham and equal Brazilian Fabiana Murer atop the discipline rankings, lacking of only a contest to crown the queen of the season in her mode.

"In fact, the Diamond League was not the main objective of the year for me, it was the London Games. That’s why I only participated in two stops before the Olympics, New York and Monaco. It was at that time that Murer and German Silke Spiegelburg took advantage because they competed four times and achieved several points," the tournament bronze medalist tells us.

Already in Brussels, last meeting of the year, Fabiana Murer could get even with the Cuban, who beat her on five occasions during 2012, and Spiegelburg also managed to overtake Yarisley in the final ranking. However, everyone in Cuba do not stop clapping the girl from Pinar del Rio, who says she will go for more in 2013.

"Now I want to take a good holiday, have fun with my people, go to Santiago de Cuba, enjoy with my friends to began training with all I got later

"I'm going to have the grip higher, to work more in the gym and in the momentum race. I hope there are no more problems with the poles, that we have more international competitions because the level is very high and very even at the moment.

"I do not want to think of 4.80 meters, I believe if I get obsessed with that mark I won’t jump and I have already achieved it in training. I want to climb higher, both the bar as in the podium, and I am going to achieve it".