The word abandoned is not in Isidre Esteve’s roadmap

Isidre Esteve and Txema Villalobos In this last Dakar they experienced an odyssey that lasted 72 hours, 24 hours longer than the other competitors. Not available to discouragement, even when the moments are so intense, they don’t throw in the towel, it’s not on their road map. When you can no longer achieve the desired result competitively, completing it and receiving a ‘finisher’ medal is the question. But he acknowledges Oliana’s visit to MD “which psychologically has been the hardest of my life. We had a very bad time at the races, I’ve been there for 19 years and there were very difficult moments, this is one of the editions where we feel more about our achievements.

“We went to Dakar with great enthusiasm, we started the first stages very well and in the Empty Quarter what happened. With Txema there were moments when we suffered a lot, when he told me ‘Isidre, I don’t see myself capable to take the car out here’ and I told him: ‘Txema, it’s time to rest, drink a little, let’s eat, let’s relax. Look, no one will save us, whether we take the car out or stay here for live. My condition means that when there’s a problem I don’t get out of the car and I see Txema working and working and I’m just there waiting for him to tell me ‘Isidre, start the car’. I tried and at 10″ the car sank again and the only thing I said to him was, ‘Go Txema, we’re doing well.’ And it was repeated,” he recalls. And it took four hours to get out of a hole, and Txema dragged four planks up, when they fell into one and six more hours of the same.

One of the wisest decisions was to stay the night on the dunes and try it in daylight, although after an hour fate returned them to the sand. And they had the opportunity to abandon and end the trial: “We never abandon, that is very clear.”

”There was also another situation. At night at the intersection control, I told him, we are here. And the commissioner told me: nothing will happen, you can ride the track and you go straight to the bivouac and I told him, ‘no, no, if I take the orange dorsal track (and go again) and we are here to do the career It is one thing to do 100% of the Dakar in all the kilometers and have a white bib and enter the final podium and another thing to leave the 200 kilometers of the stage, arrive at the bivouac in a good time, orange bib and at the finish is you don’t get on the podium, there’s no “You’ve done it, that’s something completely different.”

For him disabled by his spinal cord injury so high that Isidre could not provide help physically to his partner and his motivating side emerged, he never argued with him and never demanded. And he admitted that “I was psychologically crushed to look in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t want Txema to demotivate me.”

“First my friend, then copi, who that night sleeping on the sand, helped me get out of the car, took me to the store, came to pick me up in the morning. I can’t do it without him, without him , I’m lost, I can’t get out of the car and if he gets stuck the only thing I tell him is ‘nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to happen’. I saw that I had to do something. At the sporting level, there is nothing you can do, but then there’s the race, which is here and there’s a week ahead. We can’t give up, the last thing we need to do is give up.”

And after so much management of the duo, when they manage to finish the stage – there is a virtual point marked by the navigation tablet, it beeps and the timer stops -, the link and they reach the bivouac, the tears of emotion are come to their eyes. “When we finally crossed the finish line, there was no one, we were the last, the clock stopped 24 hours later than expected. You make a connection and you’re alone, you get to a bivouac, where normally there are 4,000 people, and there’s nothing and you see four people running, the members of your team, and it’s amazing . He was still emotional when he said it a month later. What was not seen was when the tablet beeped marking the end of the time trial, they looked at each other and cried uncontrollably.

The Nubolo smart cushion has once again worked a miracle

And the Nubolo smart cushion whose design he perfected over seven years through his project with the Isidre Esteve Foundation to prevent the appearance of pressure ulcers in a wheelchair user like him is a miracle. That’s how far that year and a half he spent in bed after his first post-spinal cord injury in Dakar. He explained that “when sitting there is less gluteus and the bone is very close to the skin, it cuts off the blood supply, the tissue dies, necrosis occurs and this is the wound. What the pillow that I wear, which is divided into seven zones that are swollen and clotted, continue to activate blood circulation and my skin has been the same from the first to the last day. I can run again, my skin is flawless and people with mobility problems taking action can be beneficial.” And they have already completed a clinical trial at the Vall d’Hebron hospital so that its three versions can be prescribed by Social Security.

And next year Isidre Esteve will complete his 20th Dakar, 10 on motorcycles and 10 on cars: “We will change the car to go to the penultimate version of the Toyota with the biturbo V6 engine, for sure, and start racing sooner than we thought.” And always with his people.