Santiago Lange, the man who found freedom in …

“We were two survivors fresh out of operating room hell and cancer – her hairless, me speechless – and we hugged in relief. Santiago Lange, gold medalist at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro 2016 with Cecilia Carranza, had beaten lung cancer a year earlier. At the same time, his sister Inés suffered from the same disease, but with the breasts. 16 chemotherapies she, in circles and circles until accepting the operation in her case. In 2015, they got together to kiss at a gas station in Buenos Aires. She was leaving for Italy and he was with one foot in Rio. The description of this moment is one of the moving parts of the book Wind: the trip of my life, for which the 59-year-old athlete told his life story to journalist Nicolás Cassese.

Almost 300 pages of intimate and sporty details. A year after this hug with his sister, and recovered, he won the gold medal with Carranza in the Nacra 17 category. He was 54 years old. and a great previous Olympic experience. Two bronze medals with Carlos Espínola at the Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 Games. He had also participated in Seoul 1988, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000. “The gold medal in Rio represents the conquest of a dream that I have. have continued for a long time, “remember. “This Olympic podium not only marks the highlight of my career, but is linked to the most important elections of my life.” The sport, will be drawn in conclusion of the reading, it cost him a marriage, other couples and to move away from his children. But it also gave him the opportunity to travel the world and make friends in all the ports he visited. “I know the decisions I made have affected my relationships. There were times when I spent nine months of the year traveling the world, competing. I understand how difficult it is to keep a couple with this rhythm. I have been alone for a long time. It is not something that I have been looking for ”.

Wind seems at the same time an attempt to find out who was this stern father to whom he devotes almost half of the book and that he will mention again emphatically. In fact, the first chapter he refers to is titled Discipline at home, freedom on the river: “In the water, where I have always spent the best hours of my life”, he explains. Enrique Jorge Lange was obsessed with order. Every evening, she ordered her children to leave their clean closets and their clothes ready for the next day. He used to shop around to confirm fulfillment of his order. “Once he threw the contents of the cupboards on the floor and forced us to put everything back together. When Enrique Lange came home from work, everyone had to be ready to dine at a “perfectly tidy” table. Before eating, I checked their hair and hands for cleanliness. He was taking a nap and was not allowed to play in the garden of the house so as not to disturb him with noise. He imposed ways of dressing: shirt inside the pants, short hair and moccasins. Santiago’s friends and his brothers were afraid of him, recalls the sailor. “He never yelled at us or called for corporal punishment, he imposed himself with his gaze and his military manners.”

Enrique Lange was a liberal in the navy and an anti-Peronist. He was a sailing substitute for the Argentine team for the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. He never spoke with his son Santiago about this experience. “I haven’t had a chance to talk about so many other things either,” Lange says. “He didn’t look for me or worry about what I was doing.” “But he taught me to be responsible, engaged and respectful.” However, they remember that in the family, Santiago was the favorite among their children. Maybe because they both liked sailing.

In the 1970s, Enrique Lange had strong arguments with another of his sons, Martín, CIS rugby player and social volunteer. “My brother questioned his status as a sailor and leader of a multinational, two institutions he considered to be the guarantors of an unjust system that oppressed the poor,” explains Santiago Lange. One of Martín’s best friends, Alejandro Sackman, disappeared during the dictatorship. In those same years, Enrique Lange – director of Renault – had suffered a stroke. He was armed and in detention. Two policemen guarding his house were shot dead on May 13, 1976.

In the early 1980s, Santiago went to study in England. I was 19 and dreamed of sailing. But the nights in Southampton, where he lived, had become dangerous for him because he was Argentinian in the midst of the Falklands War. Cancer ended his father’s life. But for Santiago Lange, the memory has always weighed on him: “I needed my father’s approval,” he insists. And he dedicated his first sporting triumphs to him. They called him “the German Lange”: “A tribute to my father”. She also thought of him when she won her first Olympic medal.

What followed was settling in his sports career between money problems and with the management of Argentine sport. He began to compete with Camau Espínola and they formed a top notch duo. The short time he spent in Buenos Aires, and now divorced, he shared it with his children on a boat that served as a home. He could have been a politician but he preferred to continue sailing. Time proved him right.

So much so that, already a veteran of common sport, he has set the Rio Games as his goal. Coaches and friends cheered him on: “They told me it was ridiculous to go back to the Olympics at this point in my life.” But it continued. His passion for sport did not stop despite his age. He even competed in Europe with Carranza and with two of his sons. “A 27-year-old woman, two young people of 19 and 26 and me, with my 52 years”, quips in Wind.

“I have always liked to analyze victories with the same rigor as defeats. If one does not have vertigo in front of the result, the success can leave invaluable lessons “he said to Cassese. Among these triumphs, the one he achieved against cancer counts.

“Everything is recorded but never takes stock. And now comes the obligation of balance ”, he writes. Franz Kafka Hermann Kafka, his father. He reads in his hard and classic Letter to father. Part of this is in Wind.