Breathe
By Barbara Anderson
At 1:14 p.m. on September 19, 2017 at the Francisco Márquez Olympic Pool in Mexico City, Naomi Somellera began to feel that the water was pounding like in the sea. "Living an earthquake inside the water is something very desperate because it moves at a speed that exceeds your weight, you do not control where you are going, the tide inside a pool is so powerful that it hits you from one side and the other, it is a storm in a tile box of 50 by 21 meters."
Naomi is a short swimmer who was training for the Para-Swimming World Championship, which was going to be nine days later right in that pool, right in Mexico City, right where she lived that 7.1-degree earthquake "We were five or six people in the water; some of us got out on our own and others were pulled out as best they could. I was the second to last to get out, the one who took the longest was my partner Nely Miranda. She uses a wheelchair and does not have the trunk strength to move on her own, and her assistant could not get her out either," Naomi told me. The multi-award-winning medalist was able to get out of the uncontrollable tsunami when a local worker helped her.
