Torelló“The bar was set very high for me. Almost unattainable,” he says. Maybe that’s why Erik Noya became a climber. Silver in the speed modality at the 2021 World Cup representing Spain and established in the Sant Cugat CAR since 2021, he is a descendant of a man who appears on Wikipedia and another who has a street named after him. His maternal great-grandfather, Fèlix Cardona, was born in 1903 in Malgrat de Mar and was “a very important Catalan in Venezuela”. Explorer, he discovered and mapped several points in southern Venezuela, such as the highest waterfall in the world (Salto Ángel). Noya tells her story with pride, as does the other branch of the family.
His maternal great-grandfather, a native of A Guarda, between Vigo and Portugal, had a printing press where he published anti-Franco material. “I know they were looking for him to shoot him. A friend’s son hid him in his house and one day there was a knock on the door. That man warned him and he ran out. He was saved thanks to him. I have relatives who were tortured and shot,” recalls Erik. His grandparents had to emigrate to Venezuela because of the persecution, because of the ravages of the war and the miseries of the post-war period.
Erik Noya is the great-grandson of an anti-Franco fighter and a well-known cartographer
He, born in 1994 in the South American country, remembers a “very happy childhood”. And he remembers well the first time he climbed: at the birthday party of Daniela Rodríguez, a classmate of his brother. The happy childhood gave way to a dark adolescence due to the delicate situation of the country: “It was a blow, but it was not sudden. We were seeing year after year how everything was getting worse, but, clearly, there comes a point when it is already unsustainable because you see that while you’re there you’re ruining your life, because your hands are tied and you can’t progress. And then you enter a moment of deep sadness because you realize that you’ll have to leave everything you know and love, and leave.”
“In the end, it’s a dictatorship like the one that lived here during the Franco regime. What happens is that sometimes history is easily forgotten. When you’re in a dictatorship, you have a military boot that does what it wants and that does not allow people to develop and education to progress, because it is what props them up in power: a corrupt and destroyed social system is beneficial to them. That is why policies are not for social improvement, but quite the opposite. It’s a tragedy,” he says.
Guns were part of the landscape: “It was common for your friends to be robbed or someone to be kidnapped. Now I see it as something super impressive, but when you’re a kid you normalize everything very quickly and you see that you’re not exempt from anything and that a day you can be robbed or kidnapped. Or more.”
Noya admits that she felt helplessness and hatred. “Psychologically it affects you a lot living in a violent situation, always thinking about it. The conversations with friends were not about football or baseball, but about how we could change the situation and the world. We always lived, every day, with a stress deep, with brutal anxiety, and in my case it was so small that I didn’t know how to handle it. What I did was go to protest and get rubber balls. At first I believed in nonviolence, but there came a to the point that if necessary he would throw stones. And it’s wrong, because this is not life. Nor society. This, in the end, is living in war,” he points out.
Emigrant during the summer of 2017
He arrived in Spain on August 7, 2017. He remembers the date as a birthday, “like a rebirth”, and remembers the first thing he did: “Walk around Madrid at night for hours. Maybe it was ten kilometers, to savor the peace of mind knowing that nothing would happen to me even walking around so late. I felt happy, lucky. It’s not impossible in Caracas, but it’s stupid to take such a high risk. If you like adrenaline, go ahead. I like climbing more,” he laughs. But the smile evaporates in the following response: “The feeling of looking out the airplane window and thinking «I won’t be coming back here» it’s very hard.”
Already in Spain he “exchanged problems A for problems B”. He started taking climbing lessons in Retiro Park, at five euros per person, and physical preparation for Instagram and birthday parties on a climbing wall. He also started working with Glovo: “You’re not an executive in a bank, it’s true, but at the same time when you come from nothing you’re grateful with whatever it is. At that moment I was very grateful that Glovo existed, because it was a solution”. In parallel, he continued to climb: in 2018 he was champion of Spain. “I was able to prove everything I brought from Venezuela. The thing is, when you get here and say everything you bring, no one believes you. It’s hard to assimilate that your resume is worthless because you come from outside. I had to prove my worth while I was looking for my life. It’s wrong to say it, because I feel I deserve it, but a miracle had to happen. Socially, it would be more cool if meritocracy ruled and miracles didn’t have to happen,” says Noya, current champion of the European Speed Cup.
“I’m in a situation now that if someone said that to the Erik of years ago, they would have laughed and thought that person was on some kind of drug, because it doesn’t make any sense,” he says. Now the dream is to go to the Olympic Games. “I want to qualify. I don’t care what happens at the Games. If I won it would be a piece of cake, but to qualify will be a feat. I would enjoy myself because I would have accomplished something impossible, unimaginable “. In fact, it is one of the names that could qualify for the podium in speed climbing: a wall of 15 meters with 5 degrees of inclination. “It will be the fastest discipline of the Games: just over five seconds. It’s crazy. It seems like we’re running away from something very fast,” he concludes, happily. “Thank you so much for considering me,” he adds before hanging up.
