Amparo Herrera Lonardi

Happy birthday to Chile’s Amparo Herrera Lonardi, a South American champion who is spending this birthday in North Carolina.

In January 2023, at Poços de Caldas in Brazil, Amparo won the 4km at the **South American U18 Cross Country Championships** in 16:34, with Brazilian runners taking silver and bronze behind her on their own soil. She was sixteen. In September last year she went to the Chilean U20 National Championships in Santiago and won **both** the 1500m and the 3000m, and in December she closed out her junior career at the Juegos de la Araucanía in Argentina with two golds and a silver.

Her marks have kept moving up in distance as she has gone. 4:38.02 over 1500m, 10:08.02 over 3000m in Lima, and 18:24.47 over 5000m at the Mario Recordón track in Santiago in May, her newest event and her newest personal best. She wore the Chilean vest at the South American U20 Championships in Lima, and she has spent more than five years inside Promesas Chile, the national institute’s high-performance youth programme, out of Club Deportivo Atlético Coronel in the Biobío region.

And in June she left. Amparo signed with **Wingate University** in North Carolina and is on their cross country roster as a freshman for 2026. Her regional sports ministry announced it plainly: she was going to the United States, where she would stay tied to athletics, the passion of her life. She was studying kinesiology at UDD in Concepción while winning national titles; now she starts again somewhere else.

This is the first birthday she spends away from Coronel. Everyone at home already knows what she can do on grass.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Ampi! Que pases un bello cumple allá lejos, con todito el cariño de Coronel contigo. ¡Bacán! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇨🇱