Jorge and Agustín Climent’s grandparents, trainers of the fighter who has lived in Alicante since he was 15, married in 1938 after leaving the province separately in the 1920s to build a hopeful future in Argentina. His grandchildren closed the circle of their family history by returning to La Terreta in 2002.
All successes have a family root, one that sinks in time, which should be recognized when the tinsel of glory waters the heartbeat of a country with happiness. There is always a beginning, a corner of history that starts from the need to fight for a dignified, full life, for a future in peace with room for hope. At the time Ilia Topuria sent Alexander Volkanovski to the canvasthousands of kilometers away, in Alicante, A couple, Jorge and Monica, cried with joy surrounded by 2,500 neighbors in the city that gave them a second chance, one that they deserved, far from their own, very close to the origin of a notable part of their lineage.
Jorge and Agustín, the Climent brothers, have guided the world champion of mixed martial arts to the top. But for that milestone to be possible, many things had to happen first. José Climent Soler and Mercedes Ripoll Giner, his grandparents, he from Relleu and she from Aigües, embarked in the second decade of the last century heading to the Americas. They did it separately. He in 1927, alone, with hardly anything and having just come of age; and she, a year later, accompanying her family while still an eight-year-old girl.
The Matador team was received at the train station by their family, friends and members of the Climent Club
Joseph got on the ship to avoid being sent to his death. He received the call for military service to join the African front, from where he most likely would not return. His desire for freedom took him from the land and took him to Buenos Aires. She started her new life in Bahía Blanca. One year she was there. She later moved to the capital. It took a long time until their universes mixed. It was in the communities that originated in the Buenos Aires neighborhoods, which the Spanish emigrants created to get together with more compatriots and help each other.
Topuria before Mbappé: Florentino Pérez accelerates to bring the fight for the UFC title to the Bernabéu
In those meetings of longing for the homeland, the only uncontrollable thing made its way: love. They married in 1938. They continued speaking in Valencian for a long time afterwards. His children, Jorge and Susana, learned it too. And Mónica, who married the father of the Ilia Topuria coacheshe also became familiar with a language that functioned as that music that returns you to the place where you belong.
Jorge founded a printing press and Mónica taught classes. Her three children studied at La Salle, happy, aware of their Alicante origins, always present in the grandparents’ routine. In 2001, when the financial crisis that caused the corralito broke out, the Climent family’s savings evaporated. Months later, before the end of 2002, the father of the two technicians who have shaped Topuria decided to return to the roots to reconnect with his Alicante family, the one divided between Relleu and Aigües, who supported him, and later his wife. two of his children.
Jorge worked at Channel 9 and Mónica Tomassi started teaching. To do this, she had to learn with extreme ease that language from her in-laws that sounded so strange to her the first time she heard it. Her Valencian qualification helped her become a teacher. The children, addicted to contact sports, rugby, wrestling, always strong, active, agile, tried many jobs, some of them at night in the doors of fashionable establishments until they gathered the necessary capital to create what they really wanted. they felt: a gym.
He Climent-Club It was born in 2008 in a rundown place on Burgos Street, in Garvinet. There they put all their knowledge at the service of martial arts, training talents, creating a school until, one bright afternoon, Inga Bedeliano ran into Hamlet, a Cuban student of the Climents. The boy’s ears were damaged from boxing. She, who knew how to recognize that sign because her children enjoyed wrestling in Georgia, asked him where she trained. Hamlet gave her her address and the woman stood in Jorge and Agustín’s gym with two teenagers eager to develop themselves in an art they adored. The eldest was called Aleksandre, the youngest, Ilia, and both had the last name Topuria.
The UFC will land in Spain: Can Conor McGregor face Ilia Topuria?
They were only 16 and 15 years old. More than a decade later, that physical miracle, that flow of inexhaustible energy has traveled on the backs of the Climent brothers from Alicante to Olympus reserved for the gods of sport.. Now they are indissoluble, a perfect trinomial, an infinite source of triumph that gathers around it the quality and experience of a team that yesterday returned from Los Angeles with the UFC champion belt, dreaming of a fight at the Santiago Bernabéu and with a major challenge: achieving the same milestone in a higher category.
Ilia Topuria’s team got off the train in Alicante after half past seven in the afternoon. Family and friends were waiting for him there, among them the Climent-Tommasi couple, happy, crying with joy, remembering among the festive tumult where it all began, the vicissitudes that they have been forced to overcome until they taste a resounding, family success, that of a lineage forged between Aigües and Relleu that almost a century later closes the circle of a saga that does not stop, which is now continued by the grandchildren of Jorge and Mónica. The Valencian-speaking man from Alicante and the Argentinean speaker are unable to unravel their smiles as they hug their daughter-in-law, Verónica, who is waiting for her husband Jorge with their two children, carrying confetti and a giant welcome banner behind which everyone who shouts stands. “champions, champions” to the newcomers from America as an essential part of the world champion team of a form of fighting that continues to attract followers throughout the planet: mixed martial arts.
The movement at the Climent Club does not stop and neither do its owners. Today they will return to training, to teach, to try to teach other athletes the secrets of a discipline full of nobility. On Saturday, Jorge, the oldest of the Climents, will turn 48 years old. They will celebrate with a barbecue in the Alicante mountains. They will all be there except Santiago, the middle one, the only one who stayed in Argentina when the family returned to Alicante. “The day I can bring together my grandchildren from here with those from there will be the happiest of my life,” says Monica, proud mother of the creators of the Topuria genius.
2024-02-20 13:15:00
#origin #champion #Ilia #Topuria
