In the decades I have lived here, there were two sporting events that were so big that the country came to a brief standstill. One was the 2014 World Cup run, in particular the knockout round win-by-penalty-kicks over Greece. The other was much quicker, taking barely two minutes. Within that brief time frame, Claudia Poll won the first and still only gold medal for Costa Rica in the history of the Olympic Games.
The time was July 1996. The Poll sisters were the dominant force in Costa Rican swimming. Sister Silvia had won silver in the 1988 Summer Olympics. Claudia’s main competition was the German Franziska van Almsick. This was interesting to many because the Poll sisters are also of German descent.
Both were born in Nicaragua before their parents relocated permanently to Costa Rica. Another curious side to the Poll-van Almsick rivalry was that in the photos available on the sports pages, van Almsick was a dark-eyed brunette, while Claudia was macha, blonde-haired, and fair-skinned. From looking at the photos, one may have guessed that van Almsick was the Tica.
But Claudia was embraced by the vast majority here as one of our own. There existed a tiny minority who grumbled that she was not a “verdedera Tica,” just as there were in past Olympics when Brisa Hennessy, daughter of gringos, represented Costa Rica in the surfing competition.
None of that tiny minority was present inside the bar where I watched her swim to gold on that July afternoon in 1996. The Summer Olympics are a curious time for sports fans. Events such as water polo, gymnastics, Greco-Roman wrestling, and swimming are watched attentively by a worldwide audience, especially in smaller countries with participants in those fields. When the Olympics end, so do the viewers for all of those sports, until the next Olympics, four years later.
Swimming is not the fastest-moving sport. Swimmers churn through the water at a pace that could be walked on land. Claudia’s gold medal-winning time was 1 minute 58.16 seconds, which works out to about 6 kilometers per hour. But for those two minutes, in that crowded bar full of flag-waving Ticos, the excitement was nonstop.
Claudia and Franziska were in lanes 4 and 5, and by the halfway point were pulling gradually away from the field. Coming down the final stretch, Claudia maintained a slim margin. When she touched the wall four-tenths of a second ahead of van Almsick, the patrons exploded in cheers. Old men hugged, young men drank celebratory shots, and cheering could be heard from nearby houses. For that moment at least, Costa Rica was atop the sporting world.
You can relive the moment here:
