Estela de la Torre became the first (and to date, only) Mexican gymnast to make an Olympic all-around final when she competed in the 1980 Moscow Games. She finished 29th, her top result at those Games.
Seven years later, after an athletic pivot to diving that took her to the Pan American Games and the world championships, she was asked if she could cover the gymnastics world championships in Rotterdam. In 1988, she became the only woman on the Mexican team covering gymnastics for the Olympics in Seoul.
Now Estela de la Torre Borja, she went on to cover gymnastics at six more Olympic Games for two different Mexican television stations. In 2018, ESPN came calling, seeking Spanish-language coverage for NCAA gymnastics, which was rapidly gaining in popularity. De la Torre Borja was a contemporary of beloved ESPN gymnastics commentators Bart Conner and Kathy Johnson Clarke when she was competing and had the United States not boycotted the Moscow Games, all three would have competed there. De la Torre Borja became friendly with Conner and Johnson Clarke as they pursued careers in the television industry. She studied their NCAA commentary to learn the ropes at ESPN, she said, first muting their commentary, working on her own, then comparing her work to theirs.
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