María Conde turned 28 this Tuesday after just leaving the hospital. The forward from Madrid who plays for Prague underwent surgery last week to rupture the Achilles tendon in her left leg and will be out for several months, a very serious injury that will keep her from the next Eurobasket, from June 18 to 29. Conde was injured in the Women’s Euroleague match against Casademont Zaragoza in the Príncipe Felipe pavilion. The international fell badly in an action with four minutes left in the third quarter and reached the bench on one foot and in tears. She knew it had been broken, and at the end of the match all the players came to hug her and encourage her while she rested in a wheelchair.
“I’m sad. They have been a complicated few days in which everything has happened so quickly that I still have a hard time locating where I am. “I cry every now and then, I get emotional with every message I receive, and it’s hard for me to put my mind to everything that’s coming now,” Conde said on social media on Tuesday, his first public words after the injury. “I don’t know where basketball is, now I see everything very far away, but I know that the day will come when we come together again with the same desire to move forward and the tranquility of doing it in our own time,” he added.
The rupture of the tendon is a setback at a moment of sporting maturity for the 1.86m forward, and a blow to . The triple C, the trio of players that make up Maite Cazorla (also in Prague), María Conde and Raquel Carrera (Valencia Basket), and on which the national team has hopes of sustaining a period of success, has been seen again shaken Carrera is returning to training these days after suffering a torn cruciate ligament in his right knee last March, in the quarterfinals of the Copa de la Reina. He missed the Paris Games and left Spain orphaned of one of its best assets in the interior game. Now it is the perimeter that will suffer from the long absence of Conde, international 78 times, gold medalist in the 2017 Eurobasket and silver in the 2023 European tournament.
After playing in Spain for Estudiantes and Girona, Conde packed his bags in 2018 to join a pilgrimage to Wisla Krakow, Polkowice and since 2020 Prague, where he shines among the European elite. The injury also truncates the option of joining the WNBA for now after having recently been chosen in the draft by the Golden State Valkyries.
“Today is a gray, dark day. The ugliest and hardest thing in sport, without a doubt. Long-term injuries. “I wish a thousand times it had been me and not you that happened to it, but life and sport are unfair,” wrote María’s brother after the injury, who is also now recovering from an injury, a sprained right knee suffered. last December. Both are now a great support for each other.
