Valeria Quispe Fuentes

Happy birthday to Bolivia’s triple jumper Valeria Quispe Fuentes, who won her country’s first gold medal of the 2025 Bolivarian Games. Not the first in athletics. The first in anything.

That was Lima on the fourth of December, 13.48m, and Bolivia’s entire Games opened with her. She backed it up this year by winning the Grand Prix Sudamericano in Cochabamba on the World Athletics Continental Tour, and taking bronze at the South American Indoor Championships in the same city. Her bio carries the national record of 13.50, and she holds the Bolivian long jump record at 6.10m as well. Two national records, two events, one athlete.

The rest of the ledger runs fourteen unbroken years of international competition: an Ibero-American bronze in Cuiabá, South American Indoor silvers and bronzes across half a decade, a Pan American Games in Santiago, and ten top-eight finishes at South American Championships.

And here is the part worth sitting with. Valeria is a school PE teacher in Tarija. The school grants her leave to go and represent Bolivia, and when she left for Lima her own students and their parents sent her off. She teaches children how to move for a living, and then goes and shows an entire continent how it is done.

Tarija knows how to celebrate one of its own. The Fiesta Grande is on the UNESCO heritage list, the coplas change their tune with the season, and the cueca chapaca is sung to love, to friendship and to belonging to that land.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Valeria! Que cumplas muchos más. ¡Jallalla! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇧🇴