12/28/2023 0 Comments Eddie alvarezlost to Russia by less than three-tenths of a second. But his 5,000-meter relay team reached the final. In three individual races, Alvarez either slipped, was knocked down or was disqualified. “Not a day goes by that I don’t remember my experience at the Olympics,” he said, including the stumbles. He made it onto the Salt Lake City Community College baseball team as a walk-on in 2011 and overcame double knee surgery to earn a spot at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia. After he didn’t qualify for the 2010 Games, he gave baseball another shot. When a small college was the only one to offer him a full athletic scholarship because he was undersized, he refocused on his Olympic dream.īack and forth it went. At an in-line skating center in Miami, he met a trailblazer who inspired him and his family to keep going: Jennifer Rodriguez, the first Cuban American to participate in the Winter Games (the 1998 Nagano Olympics) and the first to win a medal (two bronzes in long track speedskating at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games).Īlvarez said he never intended to continue bouncing between the sports, but it kept happening. And the sport, of course, is immensely popular in Cuba, where his parents are from, and among Latinos in South Florida.īut Alvarez kept demonstrating such aptitude on his feet that he transitioned to in-line speedskating and then the ice. “It was like a thing of beauty to see him on the ice.”īaseball, though, was expected to be Alvarez’s main sport, much like his older brother, Nick, 44, who spent seven years in the minor leagues of the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. “He has always been so freaking coordinated,” his father, Walter Alvarez, said. By 11, he had won youth national titles in in-line, long- and short-track speedskating in the same year and earned the nickname Eddy “The Jet.” By 6, he had picked up tricks from older skaters at the beach and caught enough people’s eye that a local skate store asked to sponsor him. At 4, he got his first pair of skates for Christmas.
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