Man Martínez was just a boy when he caught the eye of the man who would become his trainer for more than 10 years. Manolo used to go everywhere on his bike. Carlos Burón, who was training nearby with his group, asked if he’d like to give shot-putting a try. He decided he would, and that passionate child, who then dreamed of being a professional basketball player, went on to conquer Spanish athletics. He has a personal best of 21.47 m and an extraordinary list of medals: European champion, 2002, world champion, 2003, and bronze medallist in the Athens Olympic Games, 2004.

A restless man, Manolo has always wanted to get involved with people, to work to generate a collective awareness, a community. This multi-talented artist first weaved his summer dreams as a child, beside his grandmother Joaquina. She taught him to knit, using her needles like a conductor’s baton, orchestrating the free spirit and creative force inside this incredible man. Since then, his personal universe has continued to grow.

Manolo has experimented in numerous fields: painting, sculpture, photography, music and poetry. But what really moves him, and where he feels most at home, is working in audiovisual media. The world of film and acting came to him like athletics, by chance. Film director Adán Aliaga was looking for an actor with Manolo’s physique to play the starring role in his film Estigmas (“Stigmas”). After months of fruitless searching, he decided to ask Manolo directly. Despite never having worked as an actor, and after some initial doubts, he managed to climb into the skin of Bruno Marotti, the marginal character and confirmed drinker from the Italian comic. Since then, he’s worked intermittently in film and television. His latest role was in 2018, in the Spanish series Apaches, broadcast on Antena 3.

But that’s not all. To enable him to keep exploring all the different facets of the audiovisual world, he founded a small production studio in his home town of León. To date, he’s directed a documentary series, Sueños de Oro (“Golden Dreams”), and two short films, Tríptico (“Triptych”) (the name of his project), and Páramos (“Wastelands”), where, besides being the director, he’s also the scriptwriter and an actor.