Argentina’s bronze medal in volleyball, between emotion, historical mandate and claim: “There were giant stones in the way, and we overcame them”.

TOKYO - The success of Argentine volleyball at the Olympic Games in Tokyo hides stories of anguish and emotion. Of liberation and of claims. In that bronze are condensed revenge, historical mandates and, above all, the desire to prove to themselves that a group united for years by the sport has the right not only to dream of a happy ending, but to make it come true.

Before his sporting year began, the one with the climax in Japan, Facundo Conte kissed a medal. A great little moment: he had grown up seeing that round metal, displayed in a room in his house as a testimony of the feat of his father, that other Conte (Hugo), who in 1988 and in another Olympic Games, those of Seoul, won the bronze medal together with his volleyball teammates.

Years watching that medal won before he was born. Pressure? More like defiance. The embrace of more than a minute that Hugo and Facundo gave each other in Tokyo’s Ariake Arena symbolizes many things: the affection between father and son, the father’s admiration for the son, the son’s respect for the father and, above all, sport as a vehicle to unite, grow and transcend.

“This is the most beautiful thing I have ever achieved in my sporting life, and we achieved it as a team,” said Conte, a playing and shouting machine who, when the games are over, speaks in a bronco-whispering tone and with the battery on the edge of total discharge. His vocal cords are as taxed in the game as his muscles, and he was no exception in Saturday’s 3-2 (25-23, 20-25, 20-25, 25-17, 15-13) win over Brazil.

Conte had left the national team after a fifth-place finish at Rio 2016, and a 13th-place finish at the 2018 World Cup led one to believe the future was dark, but something spurred him back. That bronze medal at home didn’t have to be the only one in the family.

“I grew up at home with an Olympic medal on display, and I actually touched it before I started this season for luck. And today we managed to make history, we achieved something no one expected, something we fought for every game, and that’s all that matters.”

The youngest Conte, 197 centimeters tall and on the verge of turning 32, now spends much of the year in Zawiercie, a very quiet town of 50,000 inhabitants in the Polish region of Silesia. There, in the powerful Polish volleyball league, he plays for Warta. The winters are bitterly cold, and the summers are relatively short.

The elder Conte, another giant, was able to do something that almost no other father of an Olympic competitor in Tokyo was able to do: watch his son fight, ball by ball, for the podium. Conte was a commentator for Argentine television during the Games, and that is how he was able to be in Tokyo and see, 33 years later, Argentina win another bronze in volleyball over Brazil.

That same team, Brazil, had eliminated Argentina in the quarterfinals of Rio 2016 after a brilliant start by the team in the tournament.

Despite the admiration and affection he feels for his father, Facundo would prefer to avoid the usual comparison with Hugo, chosen at the time as one of the eight best players of the 20th century. “Comparisons with my father are for journalism. I don’t care. This is the most beautiful thing I have ever achieved in my sporting life, and we achieved it as a team.”

A few meters away, Marcelo Méndez, Argentina’s coach. When the match was over and the bronze was a given, Méndez collapsed. Sitting down, he bowed his head, hid it in his hands and burst into tears. In the background “Ladrón de mi cerebro” (Thief of my brain), by Los Redonditos de Ricota, one of Argentina’s historic rock bands, was playing.

Méndez was crying intensely, it seemed as if he was letting off steam. And he was, indeed. He had just got rid of a very heavy anguish. The thorn in his sporting soul had vanished thanks to the electric victory over the 2016 Olympic champion. To his rescue came Nicolas, son of the coach and also a member of the national team, to embrace him and turn tears into smiles in that crowd-less stadium, the mark of the pandemic Tokyo 2020 Games.

“I’m 57 years old,” Mendez explained, “Some people get younger, others get older at the Olympics. When I got it in 2007 with the Spanish national team, I lost the Olympic qualification in a European against Serbia 3-2 and 18-16 in the fifth set. After many years, my country and my national team invited me to lead it.

Méndez coached Sada Cruzeiro for 10 years, winning six Brazilian titles, seven South American titles and three World Cup titles. He was close to coaching Poland, but finally came the call of Argentina. In those final moments of today’s tie break, in which Brazil was only two points away from victory, Méndez’s entire sporting career was at stake and, above all, whether or not that thorn would remain in his soul as it had for the past 14 years.

“This is a group that believed that things could be done. It gives me a lot of happiness and many memories come to my mind, my history in volleyball, in the sport. It is the dream I wanted to fulfill. For us it is not a bronze, it is a gold medal. The difference? We were able to close the match better than them, nothing more”.

Sebastián Solé, who together with Conte and captain Luciano de Cecco makes up the trio of veterans of the national team, was exhausted, happy, and with a sore right hand, as a result of a ball that he went to the floor. He was also asked about the link between the bronze of Seoul 88 and Tokyo 2020.

“I have no record of those games, I wasn’t born. But I know several of the players and I know they were cracks.”

“This is a nice sport, it’s nice to play it,” he added almost naif. “We ask those who can to help us, because we had a nice, good league, and it’s disappearing. It’s true that we are in a very tough pandemic, but let’s see if it can come back.”

Volleyball has a tradition in Argentina, a country whose middle classes fell in love with the sport when in 1982, under South Korea’s Young Wahn Son, the country won bronze at the World Cup held on home soil. Six years later came the Olympic bronze in Seoul. The social club system, very strong in Argentina, but nowadays hit hard by successive economic crises, was a machine for producing good players.

Almost four decades after that 1982 impact, in the bowels of a stadium in Tokyo, Solé was showing the other side of triumph. Which one? The one that shows Argentine athletes, whether in defeat or success, talking over and over again about the effort involved in competing, the lack of adequate conditions, the disadvantages compared to other countries near or farther away. Some times the complaints are justified. Other times, they are not.

“The medal is very nice, we won it, it’s going to stay in our hearts, no one is going to be able to take it away from us,” said Méndez with a serious tone. “But we have to think about how we do, let’s take advantage of this gold medal (sic) for the future, it’s a request to the authorities of volleyball and sport in Argentina. I would like these players to be the next coaches and the next leaders of Argentine volleyball”.

De Cecco asks for the same, although he does not want, at least for now, to assume the responsibility: “We have already done our part, I am not going to put on the leader’s suit now, they are the ones who have to do things now and take advantage of the momentum. With a lot of sacrifice and few resources we achieved good things, just imagine, if we had resources, what things we could do”.

Conte also took aim at the volleyball leadership, historically turbulent in Argentina: “It would be great if we could make the sport belong to the athletes. We have achieved this without the support of the leadership, with very difficult situations that we have lived through as players. I hope with all my heart that this can be taken advantage of in Argentina. May it be a starting point to improve”.

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