EKAITZ SAIES

The morning before the World Cup in Brandenburg, I received a call from home. My cousin Trumoi had passed away that same morning.

I said nothing to anyone at the competition. Not to the athletes. Not to the staff. There would be a right moment to grieve, but that moment was not there, not then, not at the start line of a World Cup.

A competition camp has its own ecology of emotion. Everyone is coiled tightly, alert to cues, sensitive to atmosphere. As a leader, you come to understand that your internal state is not entirely private — it radiates. People feed off the energy in the room, and in high-stakes moments, they feed especially off yours. A shadow in your eyes, a heaviness in your step: these things travel. They land somewhere, quietly, and they cost something.

So I stayed busy. I stayed present. I smiled where smiling was needed and focused where focusing was called for. Not out of denial — I knew what I was carrying — but out of a deliberate choice that the grief was mine to hold until the right moment came to set it down. The athletes had their race to run. My job was to protect that.

· · ·

There is a particular kind of loneliness in this kind of leadership. To stand in a busy camp, surrounded by people you care about and who care about you, and to contain something enormous inside you without letting it spill — it asks something real. But it also clarifies something. It clarifies what you are there to do, and for whom.

Leadership at high-stakes moments is not about being invincible. It is about being a stable surface on which others can stand. The moment you let your storm become their storm, you have taken something from them they needed for themselves.

Now I am home, and the weight has found its proper place. I can mourn properly — in the company of family, with the time that grief deserves. There is no shame in having waited. There is no dishonesty in having chosen the moment. Trumoi would have understood. He understood things like that.

· · ·

What I keep returning to is what Trumoi taught me simply by the way he lived. He was young. He was luminous. And he did not save his joy for later.

He was not reckless with his life — he was generous with it. He gave his laughter freely. He turned toward what he loved and walked at it without hesitation. He did not diminish his days by filling them with small worries. There were bigger things. He seemed always to know which things were which.

In sport we talk constantly about what it means to perform under pressure, to rise in the decisive moment. We build entire training systems around it. But Trumoi had mastered something no periodisation plan can teach: the discipline of living fully in the ordinary days, not only the exceptional ones. Of knowing — really knowing — that the gift is in the now, and that the now does not wait.

There is a verse from the Basque tradition that has been moving through me since I heard the news. It comes from Pierre Topet “Etxahun,” the nineteenth-century Basque-French poet, and it was made famous in the voice of Mikel Laboa. In Basque the language carries its own music, but even in translation the meaning reaches through:

Kantuz sortu naiz, kantuz bizi naiz,

kantuz xukatzen ditut nigarrak…

Kantuz mundutik higatuko naiz,

kantuz banoa hobi alderat.

Singing I was born, singing I live,

singing I dry my tears…

Singing I will fade from the world,

singing I go toward the grave.

That is the inheritance Trumoi left me. Not instruction but example. The example of someone who met his life with song, even through the tears. Someone who understood, without making a philosophy of it, that sadness and aliveness are not opposites. That you can carry grief and still be wholly present. That the singing does not stop because it has become harder.

I think about that when I think about what we ask of athletes — and of ourselves. We ask for full commitment in the hardest moments. We ask for presence when the pressure is greatest and the cost is highest. But it is only possible to give that if, in the ordinary days, you have learned to be generous with your own life. If you have not saved it all for some future moment that may never arrive.

Do not sweat the small stuff. There are much bigger things in life, and they pass faster than we ever believe they will.

Sing, even when you are drying your tears. Especially then.

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Zure falta sentitzen dut, Trumoi.

Te echo de menos, Trumoi.