Rifaterra Soaring for Cavaliers

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — After boarding a bus bound for Pascual Guerrero Stadium in Cali, Colombia, a young woman from Spain saw an open seat next to the one occupied by Mario Wilson, the associate head coach for the University of Virginia track & field program. Celia Ritaferra sat down next to Wilson, who was wearing a UVA shirt, and they struck up a conversation.

It was the summer of 2022, and Rifaterra, a high jumper from Madrid, was in Cali to compete at the U20 World Athletics Championships. Wilson was there not only to coach pole vaulter Justin Rogers, who was representing the United States, but to recruit for UVA.

Rifaterra, not as fluent in English then as she is today, told Wilson that she had signed with the University of Miami. He learned later, though, that she was actually at another university in Miami: Florida International. That 20-minute conversation in Colombia was the extent of their interaction, until Rifaterra emailed Wilson after the 2022-23 school year ended to let him know she’d entered the transfer portal.

“I didn’t know if he remembered me,” Rifaterra said.

Wilson remembered. Rifaterra had placed seventh in the high jump at the U20 world championships in 2022. She hadn’t distinguished herself athletically as a FIU freshman, but her potential piqued the interest of Wilson and Virginia head coach Vin Lananna.

Rifaterra transferred to UVA in the summer of 2023, and she’s already established herself as one of the program’s all-time greats in the high jump.

Indoors, only Sherry Gould, who cleared 1.87m (6-1.5 feet) in 1994, has jumped higher than Rifaterra (1.84 meters/6-0.5). Outdoors, Rifaterra (1.87m/6-1.5) ranks second in program history behind Ann Bair, who cleared 1.88m/6-2 in 1983.

“Here I have better coaching and also better facilities,” Rifaterra said, “and all my teammates are really nice and it’s very supportive. Also, I am more mature now. Emotionally, I deal better mentally with competitions and all of that.”

At the ACC indoor championships, Rifaterra finished second as a sophomore and third this year. Outdoors, she was ACC runner-up last season and then placed 18^th at the NCAA meet in Eugene, Ore., where she cleared 1.77m/5-9.75.

This year’s ACC meet is under way at Wake Forest’s Kentner Stadium in Winston-Salem, N.C., and competition in the women’s high jump starts Saturday at 2 p.m. Rifaterra, a junior, isn’t a clear favorite, Wilson said, but she’s talented enough to win the ACC title.

Already this spring, Rifaterra, 20, has finished first at the Penn Relays, the Virginia Challenge and the Raleigh Relays, and she’s still relatively new to the event.

“A lot of times when you get people from Europe, they’re very experienced when you get them,” said Wilson, who coaches UVA’s jumpers. “A, she was young when she came here to the U.S. and then B, she was young to the event, but it’s obvious that in her initial training she had a good coach, because she has a good feel for what a high jump should look like.

“Celia looks elegant; she looks like she was born to do it. She has this way about her where I think when she was taught, she was probably emulating a former Olympic champion.”

That would be Spain’s Ruth Beitia, who in 2016 won the women’s high jump at the Olympics in Brazil.

“When your country has the former Olympic champion, and it is recent enough in your memory,” Wilson said, “I think you might be able to just say, ‘I just want to copy that.’ ”

As a young girl in Madrid, she had no interest in athletics, Rifaterra said. When she was 12, however, her parents insisted that she take up a sport, “and I chose [track & field], because my friends were doing it,” she said. “But I hated running. I was super bad. But then eventually you start doing other events, and my coach saw that I was good at high jump.”

Rifaterra began setting national age-group records and came to love the event. Her prowess in track & field afforded her an opportunity to compete for a college in the U.S.

“Some of my friends and people I knew were doing it,” Rifaterra said, “so by the time I was graduating from high school, I was like, ‘Why not?’ I liked the idea of doing something new and improving my English and getting new friends and all that.”

Working with an agency that helped place European athletes with American colleges, Rifaterra chose FIU. The weather in Miami appealed to her, as did the prospect of living in an area where Spanish is spoken regularly.

She’d never been to the United States before enrolling at FIU. Once in Miami, Rifaterra said, she realized her new environment brought challenges for her. Having said good-bye to her childhood friends in Spain, she had to forge new relationships in America.

“That was definitely the biggest thing,” she said.

Her English didn’t improve much during her year at FIU, Rifaterra said, because she primarily spoke Spanish with her teammates and classmates.

At UVA, she’s become more confident speaking her adopted language, but Rifaterra hasn’t lost her ties to her native country. Her roommates this year include UVA tennis player Blanca Pico Navarro, who’s from Valencia, Spain, and British triple jumper Lily Hulland, who grew up in Spain.

“We speak in Spanish the whole time,” Rifaterra said, “so that’s great. Because if it wasn’t for them, I would forget my Spanish already.”

Rifaterra, who carries a double major (psychology and foreign affairs), will head home to Spain after the NCAA championships next month. She’s already qualified for the European U23s, she said, and she’ll also compete in Spain’s national championships.

In December 2023, Rifaterra turned in a performed that cemented her status as one of her country’s brightest young stars. At the national U20 club championships in Antequera, Spain, she cleared 1.85 meters, surpassing the record set by Beitia in 1998.

Ritaferra, who’d returned home from Charlottesville only a few days before the meet, broke Beitia’s record “with very, very little recovery time from travel,” Wilson said. “She was just really pumped up for it.”

The praise Beitia showered on her online made the accomplishment even more special for Rifaterra. “It was all in Spanish, but she translated it for me,” Wilson said. “[Beitia] was just basically saying that it was awesome and she hopes Celia goes on to doing really big things.”

Rifaterra’s goal is to represent Spain in the Olympics, if not then in 2028 then in 2032. When the day comes that she returns to Europe, she’ll miss most aspects of life in the United States, Rifaterra said, but not everything.

She’s no fan of the air conditioning that’s so prevalent in the South on hot days. “Everything else I like, but the AC, I don’t like it,” Rifaterra said, smiling.

She experienced culture shock in Miami when she learned where thermostats were set indoors when temperatures rose outside.

“I remember wearing a big jacket in class, even though it was super hot outside, because I was cold,” she said.

In Madrid, her home didn’t have air conditioning until a couple of years ago, and her family added it only “because it was getting super hot in the summer and it was unbearable,” Rifaterra said. “You couldn’t sleep with a blanket, because it was super hot. But my parents use it only if it’s really hot and they would put it on only a little bit. It’s a different culture.”

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