Venezuelan athlete seeks the Olympic dream

The quiet wind of the morning moves the overgrown weeds of a baseball pitch as Ahymara Espinoza throws the spherical shot hoping to get a place in the Tokyo Olympic Games. The Tokyo qualifying race is a journey that Espinoza has to make alone. No one but herself is helping her fulfil the dream of being on the list of Shot Put athletes who will compete in the Tokyo Olympic arena.

The 36-year-old athlete made it to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and to repeat the achievement this year, she needs to stay under 32nd place in the shot put ranking. The other way she had for qualifying for Tokyo was to throw the shot 18.50 meters. A mark she did not accomplish.

"You saw the way I train: I am alone. And so, sometimes that depresses me", said Espinoza. "That makes me feel like a castaway in the middle of nowhere and without support." Apart from being an athlete since 11 years old, Espinoza is also a teacher. However, her salary as a teacher – 7 dollars a month – plus government institutions grants reach just 10 dollars, not enough to live in a country where most products are tagged in dollars.

Ahymara lives alone with her mother in the coastal town of Barlovento, 123 kilometers (76 miles) east of Caracas and has endured this challenging year with a pandemic and an economic crisis that makes her way to Tokyo even harder. In 2016, Espinoza won the gold medal on the Ibero-American Athletics Championship in Rio de Janeiro, where she registered a throw of 18.19 meters, her best mark yet.