Fernando Perez Soto | León (EFE).- Darío Cuesta Álvaro, a 23-year-old canoeist from Segovia, has a multidisciplinary profile, but linked from all walks of life to the sport that captivated him, through his father, from early childhood and, although his dream is To become an Olympian, his present and future go through promoting canoeing in León, taking advantage of the natural conditions of this province to create a quarry.
Very soon he discovered a sport that, thanks to the enthusiasm, not without fantasy, of his father, ended up giving results in a place as unusual as Segovia to, through the constitution of a club, Río Eresma, generate a nucleus of young paddlers who They have reached the international elite.
From that small germ promoted by Enrique Cuesta, names emerged such as those of the Olympian David Llorente -tenth in K-1 slalom in Tokyo-, along with his brother, David Burgos and Darío Cuesta, whose passion for canoeing ended up marking his future .
Unexpectedly, “almost by chance”, he recalls in an interview with EFE, he achieved third place in the Spanish championship at just fifteen years old, which opened the doors for him to be able to receive a scholarship from the Spanish Federation at the Center for Alto Rendimiento (CAR) de León along with three other of his teammates.
He combined studies and sports
In the capital of León, he joined the improvement group that exists in a facility that he considers “exemplary in all aspects for the athlete”, and he focused his studies on mechanical engineering at the University of León (ULe) that would also end up converging with canoeing. .
In parallel, he combined studies and sports, at the highest level, which has already placed him among the world elite in the patrol specialty, in which, together with Pau Etxaniz and Miquel Travé, he won the European and world runner-up.
His restless character and also the organizational vocation, which he says he has strengthened through sport, “because you had to know how to distribute time in the best possible way, which is also a lesson for life”, led him to open his expectations towards others fields.
Thus, one of the subjects of his university career, theory of structures, awakened in him the possibility of linking engineering to sport to apply it to the design of sports infrastructures and, specifically, in the province of León he saw the possibility of applying it in the Sabero-Alejico Canal.
“It is one of the best whitewater facilities in Spain and is even among the best in the world due to its uniqueness, but with the impediment that, being a natural flow, there is only water in summer, when the important thing would be to be able to achieve its viability for I use it all year long,” he points out.
For this reason, he embarked on the idea of improving the channel, which in 2021 hosted the European specialty and which aspires to host the World Cup, designing an “intelligent” gate, which could be patented, to naturally regulate the water flow.
Darío Cuesta: Segovian canoeist and engineer
This has been one of the improvements made by this Segovian canoeist-engineer, but he is clear that other modifications will have to be made if Sabero-Alejico hosts the world championship, such as “better redistributing the slope of the canal, taking advantage of its layout upstream of the channel”.
As if his double quality as a high-level athlete and designer engineer for facilities improvements were not enough, Darío Cuesta has also endeavored to relaunch canoeing, both in the slalom and whitewater modality in the province of Leon, which already has with the best national specialist in this last discipline, Guillermo Fidalgo.
“It is a pity that the excellent conditions that the province has to create a base of young practitioners who, in the near future, will be the ones who continue on the path and also take advantage of the benefits of the CAR de León are not exploited,” he stresses.
With the support of the Federation of Castilla y León, it is promoting the Pico Azul Club, which is chaired by the also versatile Ramón Gutiérrez -a participant in the Dakar and who crossed the Atlantic solo- and, for now, has already managed to create a seed of children who distribute their training sessions between Mansilla de las Mulas and Alija de la Ribera.
“It is about creating a nucleus that is more than feasible due to the ideal conditions that exist because we already have an elite and a high level and the only thing left to do is expand the base”, he affirms convinced.
All this flow of activity does not prevent Darío Cuesta’s great dream from becoming an Olympic champion, either in the slalom specialty, in which he is already one of the main national specialists, as well as in the new ‘extreme’ that will be released in Paris 2024. EFE