Accept that people might call them hamsters. "We always make the joke too: 'Come on, let's do the hamster'," says Oriol Antolí (Terrassa, 1983). A few days ago, he achieved the Spanish record for Backyard Ultra, a discipline that comes from America. It consists of running a 6.7-kilometer circuit with a start every hour on the hour: the minutes left between reaching the finish line and the next starting gun are used to eat, rest, and even sleep. Whoever lasts the longest wins, like in the Japanese movie Battle Royale. It's a test of endurance, not speed. The discipline is "very successful" and is becoming increasingly popular in Catalonia: the third edition of the Backyard Ultra de Terra Endins brought together 200 participants in Torelló at the beginning of May.

"It was almost like winning the Champions League. For any other team, it would have been just another victory, but for us, it's our first and it could be our last. What we endured was tough, quite difficult, but it was worth it," explains Sergi Pont (1998). Ribera de Ondara, the club from a town in the Segarra region with fewer than 500 inhabitants, recently broke a streak of 31 defeats and 412 days without a point with a hard-fought 4-3 victory against Santa Coloma de Queralt B, thanks to a brace from Pont. Their last win had been on January 11, 2025. This season, they had suffered seventeen defeats in seventeen matches in the fourth tier of Catalan football, the lowest division, with eight goals for and 98 against, including some particularly painful results: 13-0, 10-9, 2-10, 7-0. "When the referee blew the whistle, we couldn't believe it. We were all laughing, all shouting like mad, all freaking out. Our faces were beaming with joy and happiness," he says.