Triple Jump trailblazer Mamona makes leap into unknown at Rhine-Ruhr 2025

Had Patricia Mamona been any less adept at hopping on a train and skipping the fare as a child, she might never have triple jumped her way to silver at both a FISU and Olympic Games.

The 36-year-old now holds a unique position ahead of the Rhine-Ruhr 2025 FISU World University Games this July - of leading the next generation as the head of the Portuguese delegation while still pushing her own chances for Olympic glory in three years’ time.

“I think I'm the first one,” Mamona says of her dual athlete-administrator role. “When I first came here, I had to ask for a track, since nobody was expecting someone to go training. They made a contact and allowed me to use a track in Düsseldorf, so I went there in the morning for a shakeout.

“We always find a way. COVID taught us that we can train anywhere, even in a small room by doing a couple of abs or push-ups. It's always important to just move yourself around because your body never likes to be at rest for a long period of time.”

Mamona was equally restless as a child. Keeping her athletics dream a secret from her parents, she would sneak out of the house and steal a train ride to the JOMA club in the Monte Abraao district of northwest Lisbon.

“My parents wouldn’t let me do athletics (so) I started practicing in secret,” she recalls. “I was so young I had no reason to ask my parents for money, so I started taking the train without a ticket.”

Mamona won the silver medal in Tokyo

The early daring and later training paid off. After missing the London 2012 Olympic triple jump final by a single centimetre and finishing sixth at Rio 2016, Mamona set a national record to win silver at Tokyo 2020.

“It was the biggest moment of my life,” she says. “I'm in athletics for more than 25 years and since I was really young, I had always dreamed about being at the Olympics and winning a medal.

“So when it happened, it was out of this world. Actually, for three months I didn't realise it - everything seemed like a dream. But I'm very proud of myself and the people who made it possible.”

Denied the chance to compete in Paris last summer by a serious knee injury, Mamona has now pushed her retirement plans back to Los Angeles 2028.

“I am recovering from the surgery, but this is also a good time for me to start thinking about my career post-athletics,” she says. “I'm trying to gain some experience of giving back to the younger generation. I'm also doing a master's degree in high performance, so I'm actually a student-athlete myself. Really, I'm an open book right now.”

Mamona has been a member of the University Sports Federation since March

Having joined the Portuguese National University Sport Federation only in March, Mamona has faced a steep learning curve in the lead-in to Rhine-Ruhr 2025.

“This is going to be quite different from what I'm used to,” she says. “I've participated in these Games as an athlete, and most of the time it was quite easy for us to complain when things went wrong. But now I have a different view.”

Mamona’s first view came at the 2011 Universiade in Shenzhen, China, when she jumped to the silver medal. A medical student at Clemson University in the US at the time, she had already won two NCAA Championships but had no multi-sport event experience.

“For me it was very important, because it was the first experience where I was with other delegations in the village,” she says.

“And usually when you're very young and start doing these competitions, it's very easy to lose your focus, because everything is new, and everything is big. You see people from other countries, and you want to talk to them and mingle.

“So this event is a really good experience of transitioning to a bigger competition, and it’s going to be invaluable for a lot of student-athletes. They are going to venture a little bit further onto the world stage.

“Hopefully, with my athlete background and this new insight of how things are organised, we can pull up a very good FISU World University Games.”

Photos: © Andrea Bowinkelmann