After overcoming new adversities, Ecuadorian Dajomes seeks to defend Olympic gold

Nothing in Neisi Dajomes’ life has been easy. Not even after winning a historic gold medal for Ecuador at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

On the road to repeating her podium finish, Dajomes had to overcome an injury and break new records in the last opportunity of the year in order to earn her ticket to Paris 2024.

From a very young age, she experienced poverty and need as the daughter of Colombian refugees who fled to Ecuador from the violence in their country. At the age of 7, her parents separated and she was left in the care of her mother along with five other siblings in a small town in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Together with two of her sisters, she spent a couple of years in a foster home, because her mother could not support them all in the midst of hardship.

Since then, every achievement has been the result of great effort, reiterated in each competition and especially in decisive circumstances.

Tenacity

One of the most dramatic examples of his sacrifice came in 2015, during the Junior Pan American Weightlifting Championships in Toronto. On his first attempt, he lifted the required weight, but almost immediately fainted and convulsed on the platform. Five minutes later, against the advice of coaches and managers, he returned to the stage and won the silver medal in three attempts.

That tenacity would be key years later when, after having won Olympic gold in Tokyo, she suffered an injury to her left shoulder, despite which she continued competing and winning new medals.

He also decided to change weight class from 76 to 81 kilos.

Heading to Paris

Dajomes, 26, explains that in the process and to recover from the injury, it was necessary to gain muscle mass and have a careful training plan that would lead him to Paris. But time was against him.

In the final of her new category, at the end of February at the Pan American Games in Caracas, Dajomes won another gold, but her face was filled with a look of discontent. Despite having achieved a new Pan American record, she had not reached the level necessary to surpass her compatriot Tamara Salazar, with whom she had to decide the only Olympic ticket for that category.

Salazar was ranked fourth in the world rankings at 81 kilograms.

At the beginning of April, the Olympic champion had her last chance at the world weightlifting championships in Phuket, Thailand. Dajomes put in an impeccable performance: she managed to lift 123 kilograms in the snatch and 146 kilograms in the clean and jerk, beating her compatriot Salazar, who did not compete in the competition.

The injury and uncertainty were behind him. The ticket to Paris was his.

“Since I was very little, I liked to do things that my dad or my mom did, things that required a lot of strength,” Dajomes said in a documentary about her life, and recalled that she loved “pushing a wheelbarrow or lifting stones,” so much so that one day her father told her: “When you grow up, you’re going to be a bricklayer.”

A date “that marked my sporting and personal life was August 1, 2021,” said the Ecuadorian champion. That day she became the first woman from her country to win an Olympic gold medal.

Ecuador has two other Olympic champions: race walker Jefferson Pérez in Atlanta 1996 and cyclist Richard Carapaz also in Tokyo.

Sister

Angie Palacios Dajomes, 23 years old and sister of Neisi, is emerging as another outstanding Ecuadorian weightlifter. She has been a two-time world champion, the current undisputed Pan American champion in the 71 kilogram category and multiple Bolivarian champion. She qualified for the Paris Games at the beginning of April at the World Championships in Thailand, where she finished in sixth place, but with the necessary marks.

With just over two months to go before the Olympics, the sisters’ Russian coach, Alexei Ignatov, complained about the lack of financial and administrative support from the Ecuadorian authorities: they did not have the money, the multidisciplinary team, the visas or the support to go to European high-training centres, as planned. In Ecuador there are no gyms or adequate conditions to train properly.

“We have asked for emergency treatment as a group,” said Ignatov, adding that they have sent letters to the Federation and the ministry, but without the required results. He warned that “one more day without leaving the country is one more day of advantage that they give to their rivals.”

Obstacles

This is not the first time that Dajomes has faced a complicated Olympic prelude. She was travelling to the Tokyo Games, but was detained in Spain by health authorities, who claimed that she had COVID-19, in the midst of the pandemic.

During her forced stay in that country, “I cried all day, I trained and I returned to the hotel to cry again, because everything was uncertain,” said the Ecuadorian weightlifter, who said that some tests came out positive in the morning and negative in the afternoon.

“It affected me so much that I lost two kilos in a week,” he added.

She arrived in Tokyo just in time, stood on the platform and won gold. When she received the medal, she showed the palm of her left hand where the words “mom and brother” were written, who died a few months apart in 2019 and were the first to believe in her as a high-performance athlete.

Asked if she dreamed of an Olympic medal at the beginning of her sporting career, she said: “No, that was later, when I had already started competing.”

And regarding setbacks, she accepts them as part of life. “We will never get good things easily, and from the beginning I have had to fight and struggle for what I wanted.”

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