They were the first professional athletes in Spain. Their salaries reached four times the average salary of the time. They filled a multitude of frontons every afternoon, not only in Madrid, but also in Cuba, Mexico or Brazil, and were the image of collectible trading cards. However, in the 1980s they suddenly disappeared and were forgotten, even in their places of origin. 40 years later, different documentaries and even fiction series such as ‘Las pelotaris 1926′ try to recover the history of thousands of racket players who were pioneers in women’s sports. Gloria Aguirre, María Antonia Uzkudun and Josefina González are some of the more than 2,000 women who were professional racket players between 1917 and 1981, the date on which the last fronton where matches of this type were played closed. Its decline began during the Franco regime, when licenses were no longer granted to women. The lack of generational change ended up causing the end of this discipline in the 80s. Now, pelotaris are a minority and in no case can they make a living from the sport.
One of the best racket players in history was Gloria Aguirre, known in the frontons as ‘Txikita de Aizarna’, who was also one of the last to practice this type of sport. Since she was little she played ball on the fronton of this Gipuzkoan town, “at first by hand and against boys,” she says. But it wasn’t until he was 18 when he discovered he could be a professional. It was the summer of 1963 and a Madrid businessman who owned a fronton met with her and her father in Hondarribia to negotiate her contract. “My parents made it a condition for me to study, so I enrolled in Pharmacy,” he says. So in the mornings he went to school and in the afternoons he put on his white pelotari uniform and went to the fronton to play up to two games a day. “There came a time when I had to ask to only play three days a week because it was impossible to combine with studies and practices,” he remembers.
