The historic captain of the Argentine national team Gonzalo Carou, the foreign player who has played the most games in the Sacyr ASOBAL league, in which he played in three teams, Arrate, Ademar -in two stages- and Puerto Sagunto, resists turning the page at 42 years old and will be a member of the Unión Financiera Balomano Base de Oviedo de Primera Nacional.
Despite the fact that after his third Olympic Games with the “Gladiators” in Tokyo he said goodbye to the Albiceleste team, the facilities that the Asturian team has presented him, in which he will coincide with two other ex-Democrats, Richi Díez and Nacho Huerta, have led to try on
an unknown category.
“Since December they had already considered the possibility of signing for them through my representative -Federico Vieyra- and the fact of being able to be close to home, since the family has established residence in León, ended up deciding to continue for a year more active “, he pointed.
Carou, the only player still active who has played a whopping eleven world championships with his national team, seemed to have extended his career one more year in Puerto Sagunto to reach the postponed Tokyo Games, but curiously, that departure from León opened him up other ASOBAL club options. “I received up to five offers of equipment of the highest category”, reveals the veteran Argentine pivot who even, after committing himself to his new club, received the offer of another team from the Sacyr ASOBAL league close to León and which also allowed him to have a fairly flexible training activity.
However, having already committed to the Oviedo, this offer was not considered, which is “open by both parties”, although he has emphasized that his commitment is for one season, after in the past he even had the opportunity to try a new experience in Qatar. that Puerto Sagunto did not allow him.
The former captain of the “Gladiators” is clear that his priorities in handball are now different, so this new experience will allow him “lower the level of demand, which was the maximum with Ademary also with the Argentine team.” Precisely the farewell to the albiceleste team in Tokyo, he acknowledges, left him “very worn out by the harshness of the tournament and also by the very circumstances of the competition with the pandemic.”
Therefore, after a full of defeats in the Asian capital, he put an end to a successful career in which he saw the exponential growth of the “Gladiators”, increasingly competitive in all the tournaments in which they participate in recent years. However, the Olympic Games showed, according to their point of view, “two very different faces, with a positive one in the first three matches in which they competed against powerful rivals such as France, Norway or Germany and the last two, against Brazil with 40 dire minutes and 20 very brilliant and the last one against Spain that, although it was tried, it could not “.
His stage, therefore, in the national team is already history, not so in handball, where he will also take advantage of the experience in his new club Unión Financiera Oviedo Base National to advance also in his other facet in technical work, which he intends to be an option for the future. In this way, he will reconcile his functions as a player with the support also of coach Ricardo Margareto “to be able to start seeing from the other side”, he says.