Mar Navarro

Happy birthday to Spain’s combined-events specialist Mar Navarro, who has now made four consecutive national finals in the hardest discipline in the sport.

Nine days ago at the Spanish U20 Championships in Albacete, Navarro scored 4,835 points in the heptathlon — a personal best, and by her own account not the only one she set across those two days. Her caption said it best: closing the season in the best possible way, finally getting the PBs to come. Add that to seventh place in the pentathlon at the Spanish U20 Short Track Championships in Sabadell in March, sixth in the heptathlon at Villafranca de los Barros, and sixth in the combined events the season before, and you have a young athlete who has reached a national final every single time she has entered one, improving the score each year.

The heptathlon is seven events over two days, and it punishes anyone who is good at only some of them. Building it takes years, and the athletes who eventually break through are almost always the ones who kept turning up to national finals in their teens while the score climbed. She trains with Nolite Team in Castellón de la Plana, a squad built specifically around the combined events, and she is not shy about crediting them — “”todo gracias a @noliteamm”” is a recurring line in her own posts.

¡Feliz cumpleaños, Mar! Que tengas mucha salud, mucha alegría y un año lleno de marcas nuevas — en las siete pruebas. ¡A por todas! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇪🇸