Cristina Gutiérrez, winner of the Dakar: "I heard: 'It's impossible for you to do those times, something has to be wrong'"

“We are still feeling emotional,” says Cristina Gutiérrez (Burgos, 1991) with her brand new (and heavy) Touareg in her arms.. A few days ago, as if it were a thriller, he won with his co-pilot Pablo Moreno and in the last stage a Dakar in the Challenger category, which is history, of motors and equality.. She was the second woman to achieve this – the first was Jutta Kleinschmidt in 2001 -, the first Spanish. And he did it, to further enhance his proposed mission of “changing mentalities” in Arabia.

You have still had to see some of the patients at your dentistry clinic these days. Yes, yes, I have still had to see some mouths. Every time I am removing more patients. I do orthodontics, the treatments last a year and a half or so. I have 5% left of what I had. When I finish I will dedicate myself 100% to the sport. His victory had a movie outcome. Everything happened at the last second, we are still assimilating it. We had been second for a long time, 20 minutes behind, but the Dakar is 8,000 kilometers and even the last meter something can happen to you. That's what makes it so special.. I started ahead of Mitch Guthrie and pushed hard, knowing that if something happened I wouldn't know. And that's what happened. I reach the finish line and realize that I will probably win the Dakar because my partner is standing still. Was I hoping then? Always. And even more so when they are such complicated terrain. I went out hoping to steal minutes. I didn't know how many, but I wanted to give it my all. How do you remember those moments of uncertainty before knowing you were the winner of the Dakar? It was very intense. There was no coverage, I was trying to refresh the page to see how Guthrie was doing and it didn't work. Twenty-something minutes passed, which was mathematically what I needed to win. When they told us that he was definitely stopped and was not going to enter, we started jumping, shouting, the whole team…Do you feel that your life changed in an instant? There are many years of work, in which, due to different circumstances, , I had always stayed at the doors. The Dakar is often thankless. You never know how it's going to go. You have to have respect for the race. I take this as a reward for the effort, for the dedication, for all the years I have been fighting.

Regardless of the result, next year he was going to make the leap to the premier category with Dacia, in the same team as Loeb and Al-Attiyah. Will this make it different? I wanted to say goodbye to the Challenger category by winning. It tastes much better that way, of course.. It is the second time in history that a woman enters an official team and speaks highly of Dacia. And share a team with Sebastian Loeb… He changed my life. Where did your passion for motors come from? Since I was very little. My father was very fond of racing, but he didn't have the opportunity to race. My older brother had a small motorcycle, I was very heavy and I insisted over and over again to let me have it. My father has an open mind, he has never put barriers or brakes on me, nor has he let me be afraid. I have to thank her. There are some images of her as a girl driving a car. She was six years old, on a small farm that my grandfather owned. I was very heavy on the car issue. I asked my father so much… He trusted me, I had already gone karting and had touched an engine. The pedals were raised with a hydraulic system, which is why she arrived so small. The first Spanish woman to win the Dakar, the second in history… Do you feel like you are breaking barriers? I have broken several glass ceilings, but because there were almost no women. So it is easy to be a pioneer or open doors that were previously unthinkable.. I consider that I have a responsibility to be able to pave the way, to ensure that other girls do not have these difficulties. I would like to be a model for other people to motivate themselves in their dreams. That would be great, really. It wasn't easy to achieve success. Did you think about throwing in the towel? Yes. It was during the time of covid, almost all the sponsors pulled out and I was forced to say that I was not going to the Dakar. By luck or fate, a good team presented me with an offer and they left me the structure almost free. Still, I had to ask for a loan. Fate told me not to leave him at that moment. I was already convinced that it was my end in the world of sports. It has been a complicated road. The motor world is ungrateful. Even training requires a lot of financial outlay. I have had to make many sacrifices. That is why it is so worth fighting for what you want, because even positive things come from the bad.

Triumph in a man's world. It has been difficult for me to assert myself, I have had to prove much more than a man. I have always wanted to ignore certain comments. That there were and I like to denounce it, because that is how change is generated. And not only from men, there are also comments among us that we have assimilated by society and that we think do no harm.. I heard: 'It's impossible for you to do those times, something has to be wrong'. Or: 'I'll check your car from top to bottom, that can't be'. That distrust affects you. If you do something wrong, it seems that the mistake is three times worse than that of a man. It was significant to achieve it in Arabia. It is nice to carry that message. You have doubts when you go to these types of countries to compete, about how they are going to treat you. There are situations in which they look at you strangely. But there are others in which even the men are very happy for the women. There is a little bit of everything, but they also want the country to be open to other cultures. But it is true that there we live in a bubble, we move from one bivouac to another and see little.