Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo

Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo y Gayarre (30 April 1932 – 20 May 2016) was a Spanish reporter and Olympic athlete. He was the director and founder of cultural program Aventura 92 (Adventures 92), nowadays named as Ruta Quetzal BBVA. Although he was born in Madrid, he was always recognized as Basque-Navarre.

Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo was born in Madrid on 30 April 1932. When he was a child, he went to live with his family in Pamplona, where he studied to be an agricultural expert and stood out as a great athlete. In the mid 50s Miguel and the pitcher of the Basque Bar, Félix Erausquin invented how to adapt that instrument to throw the javelin. In the manner of the disk or hammer, pitcher turns on itself before throwing. After much training, Miguel de la Quadra-Salcedo presented the "Spanish style" of throwing the javelin. The effectiveness was that high that in 1956 added 20 meters to the world record, which at the time was around 80. However, the record was never approved by the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations). It thought that launch was too dangerous for the public because during the rotation the javelin tip was focused to them.

He was nine times champion of Spain in the javelin, hammer and discus, being able to compete in the 1960 Rome Olympics and world record javelin with original art-based launch of the Basque-bar was not approved by the international federation. Between 1961 and 1963 he worked for the Colombian government as ethnobotany in the Amazon region.

Later he became a reporter for TVE staff, where would cover wars such as the Congo, Vietnam, Eritrea and Mozambique and events such as the death of Che Guevara (1967) or the Pinochet coup in Chile (1973). Salvador Allende, Pablo Neruda, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Norodom Sihanouk, Yassir Arafat and the Dalai Lama are among the personalities interviewed by him in his time as a reporter. He subsequently participated in programs such as' The Spanish news' (with Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and César Pérez de Tudela) and 'Adventure 92' (known in its current form as 'Ruta Quetzal'), consisting of the youth exchange students from Spain and Latin America to promote mutual understanding between the two sides of the Atlantic. Another program that he worked for was 'A Treasure Hunt', presented by Isabel Tenaille, which was traveling by helicopter somewhere in the world by following the instructions a contestant who was in the studio in Madrid.

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