The athlete from Lleida has qualified for the 400m final, winning her semifinal (52.51) at the U20 World Championships in Cali
Julia Merino from Valladolid is the only Spaniard who has run the final around the track, back in 1990 in Plovdiv
Since the great Julia Merino was fifth in Plovdiv in 1990 hIt has taken 32 years for a Spanish woman to return to the grand final of the 400-meter dash in a U-20 World Championship and he has also done it through the front door with a great victory in his semifinal in an event that is elevating the Botswanan Tebogo.
And it is that in Spanish athletics another great star, the young woman from Lleida, Berta Segura, who at 19 is writing a beautiful page in the history of Spanish athletics in the World Cups that are taking place in the Colombian town of Cali.
Ibero-American champion in La Nucía with the absolute Spanish 4×400, the leridana beat his personal best in Huelva in June with 52.72smashing the previous Spanish record for the category that she had held since 2919 with 53.22 by Andrea Jiménez who is experiencing a very complicated season and who also set a new absolute Catalan record.
Endowed with an extraordinary competitive capacity, Berta Segura was proclaimed with just turned 19 absolute national runner-up in Nerja after the azulgrana Eva Santidrián and for this he lowered both records again (Spanish sub’20 and absolute Catalan) to leave them at 52.66.
The Lleida UA athlete trained by Iván Espílez She appeared in Cali with the sixth best mark and as one of the alternatives to the great favorites, something that she demonstrated by winning her series with 52.50 to give a new bite to her best mark.
Not happy with it, the Catalan has grown in the early hours of this Thursday to repeat victory in his semifinal with his second best mark ever (52.51), just one hundredth of his record and with the feeling of having left something for the final next morning. And it will not be her last challenge, since she is summoned for the absolute European Championship in Munich in the women’s 4×400.
Berta Segura does not give up anything in the final
But… can you dream of the podium? The truth is that the competition is fierce and that the prodigious Spanish quattrocentista passed with the sixth mark, far behind the great British favorite Yemi Mary John (51.72) and without forgetting that the two Americans fell, Mekenze Kelley (53.09) and Zaya Akins (53.62).
What Berta Segura already knows is that she has made history by becoming the second Spanish finalist in the 400m at a U20 World Championship. The only precedent is the aforementioned Julia Merinowho was fifth in 1990 with 53.48 and would later achieve a sensational fourth position at the 1992 European Indoor Championships in Genoa.
In the men’s category, only one athlete has managed to be among the eight best sub’20 on the planet and he is a Catalan like Berta Segura. We are talking about David Canal, the athlete from Cerdanyola who was seventh with 47.21 in Sydney in 1996 and that the following year he would win the junior European title. She also has a sensational silver at the Europeans in Munich in 2002 and another indoors in 2005 in Madrid.