Carolina Marín announced on 26 March that she is retiring at the age of 32, but her farewell did not sound like a fully chosen ending so much as the acceptance of a limit. “My journey in professional badminton has come to an end,” she said in the video in which she made the decision public. “I wanted us to say goodbye on a court, but I do not want to put my body at risk for that.” She also left behind another, more bitter and intimate thought: “Deep down, I did retire on a court, in Paris, in 2024, but at the time we did not know it.” The champion who had imagined ending her career in Huelva, where the next European Championships will be held from 6 to 12 April, ended up accepting that her body had already made that decision for her.

Before becoming one of the most recognisable athletes in Spain, she was a girl from Huelva who had been dancing flamenco since the age of three and who one day followed a friend to a sports hall near her home to try a very strange sport, with long rackets and plastic shuttlecocks. No one in her family came from sport, and they barely even knew what it was. She herself has told the story many times with a mixture of irony and affection: “I always say yes to everything, so I went with her.” What she found there was not an instant calling or an obvious promise. “I was so bad,” she recalled years later. “If you watch a video of me as a child, it would have been impossible for anyone to say that a champion was going to come out of that.” What Carolina did not know then was that one of the greatest badminton players in history was already being formed: that story began with a stubborn, competitive little girl, hooked on something that looked nothing like anything around her.

Her character and the wolf’s cry

Her real gift, more than a technical one at first, seemed to lie in her character. Carolina Marín has often explained that her aggression on court was part of the way she competed, but also part of the way she hid fear. “The screams are also there to intimidate my opponent,” she admitted in a 2018 interview. And when she was asked how much theatre there was in her body language, she answered with a laugh: “A good part of it.” That blend of instinct, calculation and dramatization became one of her trademarks. So did the cry itself, as much hers as the racket, that release which turned every point into a message. “I am a wolf on court. When I bite the neck, I do not let go. I want my opponent to feel me there.” It is no coincidence that the documentary about her career is titled ‘My life has been an endless struggle’: the phrase works almost like a self-portrait, because in Carolina fierce demands, the need to dominate and an almost physical way of fighting against everything always lived side by side.

At 12, she left flamenco behind when she moved into the Huelva club and began competing all over Spain. Two years later came the step that truly changed her life: leaving home and moving into the Blume Residence in Madrid. It was not an ordinary move, but an early break from childhood, family and any conventional idea of adolescence. She herself had to convince her parents with a direct line: “Mum, Dad… give me this opportunity.” Behind that scene lies the less visible part of her story: a 14-year-old girl setting out to build an almost impossible career in a country with no badminton tradition, driven by the intuition that if she did not try then, she never would. Before becoming a world champion, an Olympic champion or the winner of the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award for Sports, she was that: a teenager who left home alone to chase an outsized idea.

The relationship that shaped her career

At the centre of that transformation was Fernando Rivas. Their relationship was far more than that of coach and player, yet it never really fitted the easy sentimental reading that was so often attached to it. “When I started with Carolina, she was 14, and the press began saying I was like her father,” he said once. “But I do not treat Carolina the way I would treat my daughter.” And then he added a dry, almost brutal line that explains the heart of that bond: “I would never make my daughter suffer that much.” In that harshness there was method, trust and a kind of demand that is rarely described so openly. Rivas guided her through the process of turning wild energy into a precision tool, and she accepted for years a level of discipline that very few people would have endured. Between them they built a strange, intense, at times abrasive alliance, but one that is essential to understanding how a girl from Huelva managed to carve her way into a territory historically dominated by Asia.

The other great thread running through her life was pain. Physical pain first: the torn cruciate ligament in her right knee in 2019, the one in her left in 2021, and the third major injury in Paris 2024, when she was within touching distance of another Olympic final. Emotional pain after that: the death of her father during the pandemic, just as she was trying to rebuild herself and compete again. She has spoken about it without false epic, almost as if listing a series of blows: “I cannot believe all this happened to me in two years.” She has also spoken about mornings when she could barely walk, about fear, doubts, and that third fall that is no longer just an injury but a “hole”. In recent years, another word entered the picture, one that used to be harder to hear in elite sport: psychologist. She has been working with hers since 2018 and, after so much pain, began to look at her career differently. “I have worked on it so much, now I want to enjoy it,” she said in 2022. And in 2024, still not fully accepting that the end was near, she made one thing clear that now hurts more to read: “I want to retire on a badminton court.” She did not want an injury to decide for her. That is precisely why her retirement carries something of an intimate defeat, even if it comes wrapped in the grandeur of everything she achieved.

The woman who made an invisible sport visible

The paradox of Carolina Marín is that she became a celebrity abroad before she was fully understood in her own country. In places such as Indonesia or India, where badminton is a mass sport, she was already living scenes of fame that took longer to arrive in Spain: going out to a market in a cap and sunglasses and ending up surrounded by people, needing help to escape an unexpected crowd, realising that her name belonged there to an entirely different scale of popularity. Meanwhile, in Spain, badminton remained a marginal sport until she gradually pulled it out of the margins through victories and sheer presence. After Rio 2016, she heard stories that brought her particular joy: nets and shuttlecocks sold out at Decathlon, parents playing with their children, people finally recognising a sport that for years had barely existed for almost anyone. It is now rare to find someone in Spain who does not know the name Carolina Marín and the sport of badminton. The Princess of Asturias Award finally gave her the institutional recognition she deserved in her own country.

Off the court, Carolina Marín also became a global brand, with a public profile unusual for European badminton. She represented Yonex, Banco Santander, Iberdrola, LaLiga, Movistar, Toyota, PlayStation, Sanitas, Samsung and Carrefour, among other companies, and in Asia her name acquired a commercial power consistent with the sport’s mass popularity there. That status as an icon was not born only from titles, but from a highly recognisable personality, a story of resilience that was easy to connect with, and a rare ability to break beyond the niche of her discipline and become a familiar face even for audiences far removed from badminton.

Now that she is returning to Huelva and speaking about living day by day, being with her family and recovering a sense of joy that elite sport had gradually taken from her over the years, the figure seems to shrink and grow at the same time. It shrinks because the daughter, the little girl, the woman who needs rest, closeness and time come back into view. And it grows because, by stepping away, everything that had always been underneath the champion becomes more visible: an extreme personality, an almost savage discipline, a capacity to endure pain far above the ordinary and a constant need for meaning. “That little girl who discovered badminton and wanted to win everything is happy today and is coming home,” she wrote in her farewell. The line erases none of what came before. It only returns the story to the beginning: to a girl who started out playing badly in a sports hall in Huelva and ended up making both her name and badminton stop sounding unfamiliar in Spain.