Andrea Guajardo

Happy birthday to Mexico’s Andrea Guajardo, who came home from the national university championships with two bronze medals.

At the Universiada Nacional in Puebla in June 2025, Andrea took bronze in the individual 400m and bronze again in a relay, racing for the Universidad Anáhuac México Sur. Her own university’s athletics account calls her nuestra leona, our lioness, which is a good sign of what she means to that team.

The relay is where she has spent much of her career, and it is the least celebrated skill in athletics. Relay running is a separate discipline hiding inside the sprints: it requires an athlete to run flat out while somebody else’s hand is where her eyes are not, in a race that is decided by the quality of two exchanges nobody in the stands is watching. Sprinters get remembered for individual finals. Squads get built out of people who can be trusted with a baton, and Andrea has been one of those people for years, in 4x100m and 4x400m squads alike.

She grew up around Monterrey in Nuevo León and went to Mexico City to study, which is a route plenty of Mexican athletes take and very few find easy. University athletics in Mexico runs on the Universiada, a once-a-year national championship where every campus in the country sends its best, and coming home from that with two medals is a season most student-athletes would take.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Andrea! Que te canten Las Mañanitas bien temprano, y que este año te traiga mucha salud y muchas alegrías. ¡Qué padre! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇲🇽