Manuel estiarte water polo biography examples

Manuel Estiarte, the only water polo player who represented his country at six Olympic Games, is one of the legends od the Spanish water polo. He won Olympic gold in Atlanta 1996, the silver medal in Barcelona 1992. He played in Spanish clubs Manresa, Barcelona, Catalunya, and Barceloneta and in Pescara and Savona in Italy.

He is still in the sport, but now in a different role. In the last few years, he has been an assistant coach in the football club Manchester City. He works along with his friend Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s head coach.
During the suspension of the competitions, he is “imprisoned” in his home in Pescara. In a long interview with the website Waterpolo Italy, Estiarte talked about the past, present, and future of water polo after the coronavirus crisis.

-I would not want to be misunderstood, because what is happening is undoubtedly dramatic, painful, unexpected for our times. But finally I’m close to my wife Silvia. Unfortunately, my life in recent years has taken me away from Pescara, where she lives and works. I try to see the positive side of this tragedy.

In a few months, he will turn 59, and he has lived fantastic years. From water polo, to the International Olympic Committee (he was a member of the IOC from 2000 to 2006 and now in football that matters. Important experiences that enriched him. What would you like and could give to others about all this?

-Maybe nothing. It is the experience of my life. Everyone has his own, what he deserves, what he seeks, the one for which he fights. You speak of a small part of my life, the sports one. I love and will always love. Then there is the big one: my parents, my brothers, friends, my wife, my daughters. This is true, daily, felt life. Of course, I was privileged, but I also fought a lot. I sweated a lot in the water to be able to find this road, which led me to practice a sport that I loved, which led me to travel around the world, which brought me to Pescara,

Despite the thousands of pages committed to explaining Pep Guardiola’s success as a coach, one of the most important factors is often overlooked.

There has been one constant that has played an influential role in Guardiola’s spells at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and now Manchester City.

That constant is Manel Estiarte.

“El Maradona del agua” is a nickname that aptly describes a glittering 25-year water polo career, but his time in the pool is probably the most that is known of Estiarte outside Spain, if anything is known at all.

His own story is fascinating. One of nine Catalans in Spain’s 13-man 1992 Olympic water polo team, an extra-time defeat in the final - held in Barcelona - represented a sporting disaster. Rather poetically, the pain of that loss sowed the seeds for triumph four years later, as Spain went on to win the only water polo gold medal in their history at the Atlanta Games. 

It was in that period that Estiarte, already regarded as the finest individual, underwent a personal transformation that would finally deliver the team success he so craved. By the end of his career he had competed in six Olympics, won gold in 1996, the 1998 world championship, and was named player of the year on seven occasions, but there is even more to his life away from the sport he dominated.

Estiarte was moved to tears by the Olympic final defeat in front of his own people in ‘92 but by that point he had already experienced true suffering. Seven years previously he had witnessed his older sister, who had looked out for him as a child, commit suicide by jumping from a window in their fourth-story apartment in Manresa.

It took many years for Estiarte to come to terms with the tragedy and it was not until 2009, nine years after he retired from water polo, that he was able to put his feelings into words.

His autobiography, entitled “Todos mis hermanos”, is far from a chron

The history of water polo as a team sport began in mid 19th-century England and Scotland, where water sports were a feature of county fairs and festivals.

Development of the game

The rules of water polo were originally developed in the mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain by William Wilson, a British journalist, swimming instructor, and coach. Wilson was also the author of The Swimming Instructor, one of the earliest books on swimming. He invented the game while working at the Arlington Baths Club in Glasgow.

The game originated as a form of rugby football played in rivers and lakes in England and Scotland with a ball constructed of India rubber, probably from the 1850s onwards. This ‘water rugby’ came to be called ‘water polo’ based on the English pronunciation of the Tibetan Balti language word pulu, which means ‘ball’. Early play allowed brute strength, wrestling and holding opposing players underwater to recover the ball; the goalie stood outside the playing area and defended the goal by jumping in on any opponent attempting to score by placing the ball on the deck.

In the first edition (1893) of their book Swimming, Archibald Sinclair and William Henry state "On May 12, 1870, a committee was appointed by the Swimming Association, then known as the London Swimming Association, to draw up a code of rules for the management of the game of ‘football in the water.’ " This indicates that forms of the sport we now call ‘water polo’ existed before the current name was in common use. Other names included ‘water base ball’ and (more frequently) ‘aquatic football’. For example, in the South Eastern Gazette (in Kent; now closed), on Tues 28 July 1857, it says "An aquatic foot-ball match is fixed for to-morrow, Wednesday".

One of the earliest recorded games of a sport called ‘water polo’ occurred at the Cryst