Paquito Fernández Ochoa, the best Spanish skier of all time

Until today, nobody in Spain has achieved what he achieved Paquito Fernández Ochoa: winning a gold medal in Winter Olympic Games. The skier did it in 1972, in the Games held in Sapporo (Japan) and so far no other Spanish has achieved what he did.

He was not born in Spain as it did in Düsseldorf, a city of Germany, but grew much of his life in the town of Cercedilla, Madrid population of Sierra de Guadarrama. Thanks to his father, Francisco Fernández Ochoa took a liking to the sport of skiing and 13 years, in 1963, played his first international competition, finishing in fourth place.

Until 1968, aged 18, made his Olympic debut at the Games in Grenoble, France, where he remained twenty-third in slalom and thirty-eighth in descent. Not the same thing happen in the next Olympic Games in 1972 in Sapporo. He won the gold medal in particular with a time of 55:36. Long ago, since 1928 in the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, that no Spanish got a gold medal, so Paquito Fernández Ochoa, who became the third medal and Spain in the Games (winter and summer) became a national hero.

In 2006 he died, not without first seeing how his sister, Blanca Fernandez Ochoa also skier, won the bronze medal at the Winter Olympics Albertville, France. He could, however, seen as another Spanish managed to reach the top of the podium at the Winter Olympics, at least legally, as the German-born Johann Mühlegg, Spanish citizen in 1999, won three gold medals at the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002 but was disqualified and their medals withdrawn for doping.

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