Wednesday, December 4, 2024, 1:44 p.m.
They used to meet during the competitions but she refused to speak to him after he apologized for sexual violence following the ruling in the La Manada case, events that convulsed Spanish society in July 2016. This is what he tells it in the newspaper Ara the cyclist Ares Masip, three-time runner-up in Spain in enduro, a traditional form of mountain biking, who denounces in a video published on her social networks that she has been a victim of sexual abuse by that same disciplinarian during the dispute. of the MTB World Cup in Leogang (Austria) last year, in June 2023. An accusation that has also been made to the Mossos d’Esquadra and the International Cycling Union (UCI), who organizes the competition.
In a recording made on Instagram, and which the athlete catalogs as “the most complicated video I have ever recorded”, accompanied by the tags “no means no” and ‘Metoo’, that transformative movement that began virally as a ‘hashtag’ in the social networks in 2017 to report a sexual assault, the 29-year-old girl from Lleida reports that her dramatic experience began in the paddock, a private area where the technical equipment and infrastructure necessary for the competition are located. «It had been a very long race, I was very tired. “He came around three in the morning and tried to force me to have sexual relations inside my van,” says the young woman, who goes into detail about how she had to struggle for an indeterminate amount of time with the other cyclist, a man stronger than her.
In her story, the athlete denounces that at no time did she give her consent to the aggressor and recounts very serious events: “I refused from the first moment. He didn’t stop rubbing his penis over my body, he tried to kiss me and he didn’t stop insisting. I just asked him to stop, I didn’t want to. I wanted to scream, push him away or leave. “He insisted more and more, he tried to give me kisses, he tried to touch me and pull down my pants, repeating that he would rape me while he tried to undress me.”
«I felt more and more disgust»
After what happened, the cyclist admits that she tried to forget it and not make her complaint public after other colleagues to whom she tried to explain what happened joked about such a delicate topic. However, upon learning that her attacker had tried to do the same to another runner, who asks to remain anonymous, she has decided to bring the facts to light. «Every time I felt more rejection, more disgust and more anger. At the judicial level I don’t know what will happen because it is not an easy process but I wanted to make it public because, unfortunately, these situations are much more frequent than we think. I break the silence because I believe that it is possible to build a more just and safer society. Enough of so much impunity! Since that day in Austria, Ares’ sporting career has changed, as stated in the aforementioned Catalan media. «I have hardly gone to races, partly because I did not want to meet him. “In the last year I have only done three, when before I ran 15 or 20,” she says, elaborating that she is aware that she will be questioned and “stigmatized,” but she trusts that it will serve to “stop rape culture.”
After the case of Masip, with a sports license in Andorra, became publicly known, the president of the Cycling Federation of the country of the Pyrenees, Carolina Poussier, did not hesitate to support the victim and made herself available to the UCI to gather information about this and other similar cases that may have happened.
«The federation is working with a prevention and action protocol so that these cases do not happen. This fact has accelerated the entire process and tomorrow we will get to work to improve this protocol,” Poussier said in statements to the media.
