Juan Pablo Varillas and what it means to have reached the top of heaven at Roland Garros

Let’s say it easy, so that it is understood: playing the fourth round of Roland Garros is, for Peru, like qualifying with the team for the semifinals of a World Cup. Historical, unprecedented, ultrameritorious. Since this instance is to face Novak Djokovic, 3 in the world, it is luxury. There is Juan Pablo Varillas. Looking at the Himalayas with every intention of climbing it.

What does your remarkable week at Roland Garros mean? First, the statistics: Peru did not have a tennis player at this stage since Jaime Yzaga, that giant, qualified in 1994. Then, the confirmation of a career project that has not started now, has been going on for five years, and involves the family , to his sports staff – “he is a superman”, Pablo Arraya defined him after turning his first two games 0-2 down – and that costs, let’s say, the same as the monthly payroll of the most powerful soccer team in the country.

Finally, a certainty: athletes also summarize their countries and in the case of tennis, ours have an innate rebellion. None easily defeated the monsters when he touched them. Sometimes Yzaga, sometimes the ‘Tiger’, sometimes Lucho. Today the.

While that happens, and we journalists discuss where Varillas will rise in the next ATP ranking –top 60, at least–, a highly sensitive idea about this sport is emerging: it will no longer be enough just to see it on ESPN, or tweet it; why not practice it. Elite athletes do not build their careers thinking about modifying the geography of a country or changing the color of the national symbols: they do it originally for the game, that is, for the pleasure of having fun, and only if they are the best and the opportunities line up. They become a mirror.

In this process, I intuit that, without sizing it up at all, his victories are national and his photos, new posters. As once happened with Sofía Mulanovich, who suddenly inspired so much that the shore of Miraflores became a surf school, today Juan Pablo Varillas sows the seeds of what could be, in a few years, a new fresco: hundreds of children dreaming of that, for Christmas, there is a racket on the tree.

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