400 days and a 400m record that has not been beaten in 20 years in Spain

21/06/2009

400 days before the starting signal for the Europan Athletics Championships Barcelona 2010, Gaietà Cornet, whose 400m record (44.96) has not moved from the Spanish record table, recalls his victory during the Spanish Championships in 1989, where not only did he win the race, but he also broke a record which will soon be 20-years-old (12 August) and earned the recognition of all athletics fans for such an unforgettable moment.

“It was without doubt my best race, he admits. And not for what it meant afterwards, but for the feeling that I had during the race and afterwards when I saw the time I had made. Back then I thought that it had been a perfect race and I even felt that I didn’t need to give everything to run under 45 seconds”.

Spanish athletics had looked for a sprinter who could beat the 45 seconds time. Cornet ended this long search, “although that year Antonio Sánchez was running very well and he had his possibilities too”. The following year, during the European Athletics Championships that took place in Split, the runner from Reus felt the same thing that he had done in Montjuïc: “It was during the semi-finals. I ran in 45.00 and everything worked perfectly. In the final, however, I tried desperately to break a record and to win a medal, and everything was so different. Several factors influenced me, and I finished with a time of 45.27. In the end, Black won with a worse time than the time I had done the day before, and I finished only at 3 hundredths of seconds from the bronze medal.

In 1991, an injury moved him away from the stadiums when he was thinking about “running the Tokyo World Championships final, that he reached with more than 45 seconds”. Gaietà was ready to run in approximately 44.80, but that injury left him out of the season and without possibilities towards Barcelona 1992. “We had worked to reach the final”, he says remembering his bad luck before the Olympic Games that were going to take place at home.

Cornet, Olympic team mission chief during the Beijing Olympic Games, has been linked to athletics during these last 20 years with his position in the Spanish Olympic Committee, and has seen the years go by with his Spanish record still intact. “David Canal has been close to beating it, but nor him nor others have been able to do it. I honestly thought that someone would break it. I had assumed so. Records are there to be broken. The truth is that is strange that it is still valid”, says Cornet, who will come back to Montjuïc at the beginning of August to watch the Spanish Championships this season.

Cornet is happy with the preparation work that has been done for Barcelona 2010. His next commitment starts in the next few years, with the Mediterranean Games in Pescara, where the he is again the Spanish team chief mission, but he has Vancouver and Singapur in his mind, the two Olympic dates for next year.