Daniela Garcia

Happy birthday to Spain’s Daniela García, a European champion who took down a Spanish U23 record that had stood for twenty years.

Espoo, 2023. Daniela won the 800m at the European U23 Championships, which is the sentence that opens everything else. That same June she had run 2:00.58 and broken a Spanish U23 record that had been on the books for two decades. She has since taken her personal best to 2:00.05.

The 800m is the meanest race in athletics. It is long enough to hurt the whole way and short enough that you cannot afford a single passive second, and it is decided by people willing to be uncomfortable earlier than everyone else. Daniela has won national age-group titles at U23, U20 and U18 level, taken bronze at the Spanish Indoor Championships in Madrid, and reached the 800m semi-final at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, the best senior international result of her career.

She started out on the track at Magaluf, in Calvià on Mallorca, and moved to Madrid at eighteen to train at the Residencia Blume under Antonio Serrano, fitting an economics degree around it.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Daniela! Que cumplas muchos más, con mucha salud y mucha alegría. ¡Molts d’anys, i vamos! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇪🇸