A few days ago, before going on stage, I came across my entire team looking at a cell phone. What did they see? The Olympic Games. In all these years, I had never seen them interested in athletics or long jump, and yet here they were, glued to a small screen. The truth is that just last week I found myself crying when I saw the Swedish athlete, Armand Duplantis, break the Olympic pole vault record. I also cried when Angelina Topic, a 19-year-old Serbian athlete, missed the 1.95m high jump and when England’s Keely Hodgkinson won the 800m track and field. The strange thing about all this is not the fact that I cried (since I was a mother I cry every time I sing happy birthday), the strange thing is that I cried with sport, something I don’t like and that I only do because they say it helps you live longer.

But what do the Olympic Games have to do with people like me, great sports lovers, for just a fortnight?

The first memory I have linked to my clumsiness for sports dates back to 96 or 97, when the Baywatch series (Living Tides) was in fashion. At my grandmother’s house there was a swimming pool and someone remembered to buy red buoys, just like the ones in the series, so we could simulate drowning (now that I’m a mother, I don’t understand my uncles’ idea). At the beginning of the holidays, my cousins, all of them good swimmers, chose their characters: Mitch, C.J., etc. I, the worst swimmer, was with the “drowned” character for two months.

In the second cycle came the worst of my traumas: the cross-country. It was just the beginning of the year and I was starting a painful countdown. There is something in my body that makes it, even running, always stay in the same place. It should be studied, when I die I will donate it to science. By the way, you can also understand why I get drunk with two sips of sangria, but that’s another conversation.

After two years of last places in the cross-country, I discovered a way to feel less humiliated: to say that I had chosen to stay behind to help asthmatics, which, in a religious school, suited me very well. Later I got a medical certificate that diagnosed me with “flat foot” and I was dismissed from the activity.

Throughout my high school years, I broke my fingers so many times that my parents became friends with one of the emergency room doctors. On one of these visits, after a basketball game in physical education class, the doctor asked me which finger hurt me, I told her that it was the pinky of my right hand, but also that of my left hand. She thought it was strange, but she x-rayed both hands. I left there with a splint on each pinky and a huge shame to go back to school the next day. To this day I cannot understand how a basketball was capable of such a feat.

In my university years, living in Boston, I went skiing with some friends. We climbed a huge mountain and when I saw myself up there I didn’t have the courage to go down. I pretended to feel sick and the firefighters went to pick me up on a stretcher. Do I regret lying? No, I would still be there today.

As an adult, I broke a tooth in a surf lesson and in another I was bitten by a spiderfish.
The universe is tired of showing me that I wasn’t made for this and that I shouldn’t insist. Universe, you won. I stick to the gym and swimming which, after having drowned so many times, ended up becoming the only sport I really like to practice. In addition to being safe, I know it will help me in the transition to water aerobics, something I will have to do in a few years, when I start with arthrosis and those things that happen when bodies warp.

I will continue to suffer with the Olympic athletes in the next games, but of course, from my couch, where my heart rate remains stable, my fingers safe and where the biggest movement I have to make is to bring one hand to the tissue box, while watching a game of table tennis.