SAXONS AND LATINOS
— Juan Pérez | 11/05/1923 —

A happy May light is sprinkled over the town a hundred times illustrious, a hundred times heroic and a hundred times beautiful.

The pleasant Sunday atmosphere spreads through the modern streets of the big city and the provincial streets of old Bilbao.

Some young, open-faced and checkered young men, with short berets on their heads well cut, walk during their breaks along café terraces and along shady avenues. They are almost all manual workers, those artisans who are the emblem of the town. The sons of potentates are confused with them, burly hunks who have been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, but who have not lost their trace of brave Basque young men. Ynos and others have a stiff neck, a powerful torso, and a high light in their forehead and eyes. They have the faces and air of conquerors.

They all talk about the same thing, the same event that the town is passionate about as the Athenians were passionate about Pericles' tale of the celebration of the Olympic festivities.

The Saxon athletes and the Latin athletes will compete for the laurel on a flowery stadium, in the presence of thousands of beautiful women and passionate young men.

Bilbao, her most noble sister, home of knights, cradle of heroic intelligences and iron wills, lets the raging fever of sport run through her veins.

THE TOURNAMENT.

The professional Saxons go out into the fields. Strong sailors, workers hardened by the hustle and bustle of the docks, mountaineers from Scotland or sailors from Wales, have been subjected to scientific treatment, selection and a special lifestyle. They look like machines. One of them has on his forearms, along with the indentations, some livid tattoos that remind us of the athlete's origins.

And the Latins leave, Castilians from the plateau, agile Mediterraneans whose remote ancestors came to the beaches of the Levant from immortal Attica and from luminous Latium, in light and heroic ships; hard and light Cantabrians, grandchildren of those who knew how to collect in their spirit as in a reliquary the pure Spanish essences when other peoples and other civilizations pushed them towards the mountains of the North.

The tournament begins; the Saxons, cold, serene, silent, advance or retreat like precision machines; the Latinos, more artistic, become enraged with their gestures and their voices, they jump, they stretch, they break into improbable attitudes.

And finally, they triumphed. They have put an ardor of inspiration into their game. The ancient and heroic lyre of a Hellenic poet would have placed a sonorous and flexible stroja at the foot of each name.

THE WINNER.

I bring the obsession of this singular man whom Lissippus would have made an immortal statue. He is the most Latin and the most Hellenic of all. With supreme grace in all movements, he stood out above the twenty-two athletes. They tell me that this heron came from the blue coasts of the Plana Castellón sea.

Seeing him stretch above a cluster of enemies with his fists raised, his head erect, his body rigid in a formidable and beautiful tension of all his muscles, we experience a pure aesthetic emotion, like the one that would shake us before a marble from Athens.

The name of the winner is Ricardo Zamora, to whose glory as an athlete I pay a tribute of admiration.