Athletics came into his life by chance. Nuno Fernandes played roller hockey but was unmotivated because he spent more time on the bench than playing. The sisters were athletics athletes and he decided to try it. He didn’t show much talent.
“The tests I did were bad,” he admits. If he had been to enter athletics, “I wouldn’t have passed.” But, “since I had two sisters there,” they let him stay to see what he could do. “I was entertained. I was jumping, running, throwing…”
The turning point came when his club – Clube de Iniciação e Propaganda do Atletismo (CIPA) – went to a championship and needed to present an athlete in each specialty. There was no one for pole vaulting.
“I liked climbing trees, doing inverted jumps, and they thought I was capable of having enough dexterity to pole vault,” he says. They put an iron rod in his hands and, from that moment on, he discovered his place in athletics.
“I started to enjoy it. I kept climbing, climbing, climbing. As you climb, you become more motivated.” He was so motivated that he quickly showed results.
In his sporting career he was seven times national champion of the sport between 1992 and 1998. And represented Portugal three times at the Olympic Games – Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996) and Sydney (2000).
During his first participation, in Barcelona, he remembers feeling like he was “flying” when he paraded in the opening ceremony at the Olympic stadium. “I was amazed to see everything, the music, the lights…”, he recalls.
Parents never allowed sports to take precedence over studies. He always kept books under his arm. He graduated in computer engineering and started working when he was still in high competition. After completing his master’s degree in management, he became an assistant professor at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia in Porto. He worked as an academic for 12 years.
He ended his sporting career after the Sydney Olympic Games. He still tried to go to Athens in 2004, but his body was already tired. At 34 years old, the age he was at the time, recovering from injuries is starting to be very difficult, he explains.
The transition was made easier by the fact that I had been working outside of sport for many years. But he doesn’t hide the fact that he went through a difficult phase, especially in psychological terms. “You get so addicted to training” every day and when you suddenly stop, “it’s a strange feeling”. Something was missing. Today he practices paddle tennis.
After teaching, he entered the business world. He opened a toy company in partnership. “We managed to make a few million in revenue, but in the meantime, the toy path no longer made sense”, with children increasingly looking for digital. They decided to close the company.
“Sometimes it takes courage to close companies and fire people,” he says. If there was one thing he learned in sports, it was how to lose. When he goes to schools to talk to students about his life as an athlete, he tells them that he lost many more times than he won.
He also brought this lesson that failure is part of the process to the business world. However, given his life story, he considers himself a “winner”. He always remains humble, he emphasizes. “It is important for a person to have their feet on the ground and understand that there is always someone superior.”
Today he is the managing partner of Domus invicta, a real estate company.in Porto. A business that has slowed down its growth rate but is still “very fashionable in Portugal”.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
