Eva Santidrián Ruiz: Burgos Born, World Champion
On the afternoon of May 11, 2025, in Guangzhou, China, Spain’s women’s 4×400 metre relay team crossed the finish line in a new national record of 3:24.13, beating the United States and South Africa to claim gold at the World Athletics Relays. Among the four women who made that happen — Paula Sevilla, Eva Santidrián, Daniela Fra, and Blanca Hervás — the second leg belonged to Santidrián, who received the baton in second place, held Spain’s position with controlled power, and delivered the relay cleanly into Daniela Fra’s hands. Hours later, still processing what had happened, Eva Santidrián described her feeling in one frank sentence: “Estoy entre contenta y en shock.” Somewhere between happy and in shock.
It was an honest reaction from a woman who has spent most of her life being honest about what she’s doing and why. From a childhood of cross-country races and village fun runs in the hills around Burgos, through years of patient development, national championships, European continental competitions, an Olympic Games, and now a world title, Eva Santidrián Ruiz has built something substantial and real. She is 25 years old, a four-time Spanish national champion in the 400 metres, the holder of multiple Spanish records, and one of the most important figures in the long renaissance of Spanish women’s quarter-mile running.
Burgos Childhood: A Running Start
Eva Santidrián Ruiz was born on January 25, 2000, in Burgos, the historic Castilian city in north-central Spain, tucked between the windswept Castilian plateau and the foothills of the Cantabrian mountains. She grew up there, and the city has claimed her as one of its own at every step of her career. She stands 1.70 metres tall and weighs 61 kilograms — a lean, powerful build suited to the quarter-lap events she has made her own.
She attended the Colegio de los Jesuitas in Burgos from her earliest school years through the end of secondary, and remembers those years with genuine warmth. “I was born in Burgos. It’s my land,” she has said. “I remember my childhood as very happy and beautiful. They were very good years at that school where I made many friends.” Her infancy and primary years were filled with outdoor activity — excursions in the countryside with her parents, time with her grandparents, and a general restlessness that pointed toward sport.
She tried several activities: basketball, horseback riding, and athletics. The last one stuck. By the time she was six years old she was running — first in village races and cross-country events, the kinds of informal competitions that are fixtures of the Spanish rural sporting calendar. In those early years she also tried hurdles, long jump, and even discus, moving around the track and field landscape with the curiosity of a child who hasn’t yet found her specialty. “Since I was little I was always quite fast,” she has said, and that speed gradually pointed her toward the velocity events.
At some point in her early teens, the 400 metres became her event. It is not a distance that announces itself immediately as a child’s obvious choice — the 100 and 200 metres tend to attract the flashiest, most explosive youth sprinters — but the 400 is the event where genuine speed meets the capacity for sustained effort, and that combination would prove to be Santidrián’s particular gift.
Early Excellence: The Sub-16 and Sub-18 Years (2014–2017)
The RFEA’s official biography for Santidrián documents a national championship record that begins not in 2022 or 2021 but in 2014, when she was fourteen years old. That year, she won the Spanish sub-16 national title in the 300 metres hurdles at the indoor championships. In 2015, competing as part of the same sub-16 cohort, she added the national sub-16 long jump title and the sub-16 300 metres title, both outdoors — and also the sub-16 indoor 300m title. For a child still in her early teens, this breadth of excellence across sprint, jump, and hurdles events was a clear signal that an unusual athletic gift was at work.
She was competing at this stage for the Universidad de Burgos athletics club, representing her home city at regional and national level while continuing her secondary education at the Jesuitas school. The 400 metres became her primary focus as she grew older and stronger, and by 2016 — her first full sub-18 season — she had achieved something remarkable: a national sub-18 double, winning both the indoor and outdoor Spanish championships in the 400 metres. At just sixteen, she was the best sub-18 400m runner in Spain. The outdoor win came with a time of 55.54 seconds; the indoor with 56.25. Modest marks by the standards she would later set, but extraordinary for a teenager competing at national level for the first time.
The same year, she represented Spain at the European Under-18 Athletics Championships in Tbilisi, Georgia, finishing sixth in the 400 metres final with a time of 56.08 seconds. Competing at a continental championship at age sixteen, against the best young quarter-milers in Europe, was a formative experience — one that confirmed she belonged on an international stage even if the medal remained out of reach at that stage.
In 2017, she retained the Spanish sub-18 400m outdoor ranking (posting 55.00 for second in the sub-18 rankings) and competed for the first time in the Spain-Portugal under-18 international meeting in Ávila, where she ran 55.80 for second place. She also set a sub-18 short track personal best of 55.88 that year. The progression was steady and deliberate — not the explosive jump of someone peaking early, but the patient upward curve of an athlete being developed with care.
The Barcelona Years: University, FC Barcelona, and the Transition (2018–2021)
In 2018, at age eighteen, Eva Santidrián made a move that reshaped her career and her daily life simultaneously. She signed with FC Barcelona’s athletics section — joining one of Spain’s most prestigious sports clubs at an elite level — and relocated to Valladolid, two hours south of Burgos, to train under coach Juan Herrero Valentín. She would spend the next four years as an FC Barcelona athlete, with Herrero as her technical director throughout. In making this move, she followed in the footsteps of another famous Burgos native in athletics, the former 1500m European champion Juan Carlos Higuero, who had also passed through Barcelona’s athletics programme in an earlier era.
Valladolid was chosen not just for Herrero’s presence but because it allowed her to pursue her university studies while training seriously. She enrolled in the degree programme for Nutrición Humana y Dietética (Human Nutrition and Dietetics) at the University of Valladolid. Balancing a demanding academic course with elite athletics preparation is not a minor logistical challenge, but Santidrián has consistently described it as something she considers fundamental to who she is. “The fact of having had to combine the two things my whole life has made me develop an enormous capacity for organization and effort,” she said in 2025. “I was always conscious that I had to get to both — studying and training — so I think I’ve become a very constant, organised and persevering person.” She completed her degree in 2022 and subsequently completed a postgraduate qualification in nutrition and epidemiology.
The 2018 and 2019 seasons, her first two years with Barcelona and at university, were periods of adjustment. She competed in the sub-20 category, reaching third in the Spanish sub-20 rankings in the 400m short track in 2019 with 55.86. In 2018, she had reached the International Meeting in Minsk as part of a sub-20 indoor international programme, running 57.82 in the 400 metres.
The 2020 season was curtailed almost entirely by the pandemic, and the 2021 season became her first real breakthrough at the sub-23 level. Competing still for FC Barcelona, with Herrero guiding her training in Valladolid, she posted a 23.68 in the 200 metres to win the Spanish sub-23 outdoor title in Getafe — an event that demonstrated she had speed beyond the 400m — and followed that with the sub-23 indoor 200m title as well. She also collected a bronze at the sub-23 indoor 200m nationals.
The biggest moment of 2021, however, came in Tallinn, Estonia, at the European Under-23 Athletics Championships. Running the 4×100 relay for Spain alongside Carmen Marco, Jaël-Sakura Bestué, and Aitana Rodrigo, Santidrián and her teammates set a new Spanish sub-23 4×100 record of 43.50 seconds in the heats and then ran 43.74 in the final, claiming the silver medal. It was her first international medal, won in a sprint relay alongside athletes who would become some of the most decorated Spanish sprinters of their generation. The moment confirmed that Santidrián was not just a regional story but a genuine international contributor.
The Breakthrough: 2022 and the National Double
By 2022, Eva Santidrián was a finished athlete in every meaningful sense: technically refined, strategically mature, and ready to compete at the absolute national level. The season would be the most significant of her career to that point, and it unfolded in three decisive acts.
First, in May 2022, she travelled to La Nucía on Spain’s Mediterranean coast as part of the Spanish squad for the Ibero-American Athletics Championships. In the 4×400 relay, the Spanish team not only won gold but set a new Spanish under-23 4x400m record of 3:31.72 — a mark that stood as the best ever by a Spanish sub-23 relay quartet.
Then, in June 2022, at the Spanish National Championships in Nerja, she ran 52.39 seconds in the 400 metres final to claim her first senior national title. She crossed the line well clear, and the margin was comfortable enough to leave no doubt. She was 22 years old and competing in her first season truly focused on the 400 metres as her primary individual event. The same weekend, she contributed to the national 4×400 title as well, giving Burgos and Castilla y León two gold medals to celebrate from a single championship.
The third act came in August 2022 at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon — the first global championship of her career. She ran in both the women’s 4×400 relay and the mixed 4×400 relay, with Spain reaching the final in the women’s event and finishing seventh in the heats. She then represented Spain at the European Athletics Championships in Munich, where the Spanish women’s 4×400 squad reached the final and finished eighth — a result that, while outside the medals, represented genuine European final experience for a team growing in belief and ambition. She also competed at the Mediterranean Games in Orán, Algeria, finishing fifth in the 200 metres (23.33).
Consolidation: 2023
In 2023 she retained her Spanish national title in the 400 metres outdoor, running 52.67 for third in the national rankings. She also claimed the first of her senior indoor national championships, running 53.05 in Madrid. With back-to-back national titles and two indoor crowns in four years of senior competition, she was cementing a reputation as the most consistent Spanish 400m performer of her generation. She competed again at the World Athletics Championships, this time in Budapest, with the Spanish 4×400 relay reaching the heats (finishing seventh with 3:31.91). The season ended with her firmly established as a senior international, with seven caps in the national colours to that point.
An Olympic Year: 2024
The 2024 season saw Santidrián move to a new club — Facsa-Playas de Castellón, one of Spain’s powerhouse athletics programmes — while maintaining her training partnership with coach Juan Herrero. The combination proved immediately productive. She won the Spanish indoor national championship in the 400m short track, running 52.67 — a new personal best indoors at the time — in Ourense in February, then defended that title to win the national short track crown for the second consecutive year.
Then came the summer and the most storied stage in world sport. At the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Santidrián competed in the women’s 4×400 metres relay for Spain, helping the team to a fifth-place finish in the first heat with 3:28.29. It was her first Olympic appearance, and while the team did not advance to the final, the experience of competing on the Olympic stage — of racing in a Paris stadium on the world’s most watched athletics night — marked a significant chapter in her career. Burgos celebrated the achievement: alongside swimmer Marta Fernández, athlete Dani Arce, and archer Pablo Acha, she was honoured at the provincial Gala del Deporte as one of the four city representatives who had competed at the Games.
Earlier in 2024, she had also contributed to a major relay milestone. At the World Athletics Relays in Nassau, the Spanish 4×400 women’s team ran 3:27.30 in qualifying and 3:27.30 in the second qualifying round — results that helped Spain begin to close in on the national record in the event. By the end of the year, at the European Athletics Championships in Rome, the relay had run 3:25.25 (a world-leading mark and new Spanish national record at the time), finishing seventh. The direction of travel was unmistakable.
The World Championship Year: 2025
The 2025 season was, by a significant margin, the best of Eva Santidrián’s career — and it produced results that will be in the history books of Spanish athletics for a very long time.
The indoor season opened brightly. On January 18, 2025, she ran 36.96 seconds in the 300 metres short track — a new Spanish absolute record in the event, and the best mark by any Spanish woman at any age category over the distance. On February 23, 2025, at the Spanish indoor national championship in Madrid, she ran 51.46 in the 400m short track, claiming her third consecutive indoor national title and setting yet another personal best. She also ran 51.70 in Salamanca in February, and represented Spain at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, where she reached the semi-finals of the 400m (running 52.82) and the Spanish 4×400 relay finished fourth with 3:25.68 — yet another national record.
The outdoor season was even more spectacular. On June 28, 2025, in León, she ran 51.35 seconds in the 400 metres — a new personal best and the best mark of her career over her primary individual event. She had broken the 52-second barrier comfortably the previous season; now she was approaching the sub-51.20 territory that would put her in genuine European contention as an individual 400m runner. Further strong performances followed: 51.68 in Tarragona (August), 51.88 in Ordizia (July), 52.03 in Marseille and Leuven. She competed at the Spanish national championships and returned to World Athletics Relays competition with the relay squad.
And then came Guangzhou. At the World Athletics Relays on May 11, 2025, the Spanish women’s 4×400 team — Paula Sevilla, Eva Santidrián, Daniela Fra, and Blanca Hervás — ran 3:24.13 seconds to win the gold medal, beating the United States and South Africa, and setting a new Spanish national record in the process. The previous record of 3:25.25, itself set only in 2024, was obliterated. Spain had beaten the USA. Spain had won the relay World Championship. Paula Sevilla opened with a strong lead-off leg before handing to Santidrián in a strong position; Santidrián held Spain in the race before a brilliant third leg from Fra gave Spain the lead, and Hervás closed it out in the final 100 metres with what witnesses described as one of the great individual relay finishes in recent Spanish athletics history.
The reaction in Burgos was overwhelming — messages from local politicians, athletes, and the broader public filled social media within hours. Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, the President of the Junta de Castilla y León, posted his personal congratulations. For a city of 175,000 people that has long taken quiet pride in its athletic culture, having one of its daughters win a world relay championship was a genuinely historic occasion.
Santidrián then competed at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in September 2025, where the relay squad ran 3:24.76 in the heats — fifth in the heat but another excellent time for a programme that has now established itself as one of the top five women’s relay programmes on the planet.
By the end of 2025, she had been named the Best Athlete in Burgos for the second consecutive year at the provincial Gala del Deporte, a recognition of achievements that spanned four national titles, an Olympic appearance, a World Athletics Relays gold medal, and multiple national records.
The 2026 Season and New Balance
For the 2026 season, Santidrián moved to a new club: New Balance Team, the Spanish athletics squad sponsored by and named for the American footwear and sportswear brand. The move coincided with a change in her primary sponsorship relationship with New Balance, a brand with deep roots in distance and track running. Her RFEA biography lists her as a New Balance Team athlete for 2026.
She opened her 2026 campaign on January 24 at the indoor championships in Salamanca, running 54.17 in the 400m short track — an early-season workout time rather than a peak performance, typical of indoor preparation before the main competitive season. In May 2026, she contributed to Spain’s 4×400 mixed relay squad at the World Athletics Relays in Gaborone, Botswana, running a sixth-place finish (3:13.05) alongside Daniel García, Gemma Arenas, and Carmen Avilés in the mixed relay format.
Coach, Club, and Philosophy
Throughout the entirety of her senior career — from her move to Valladolid in 2018 through her world championship year in 2025 — Eva Santidrián has worked with one coach: Juan Herrero Valentín, who is based in Valladolid. Herrero is one of Spain’s most respected sprint coaches, and his influence is visible in the technical control and tactical intelligence Santidrián brings to her racing. She has described him as central to her development, and the consistency of their partnership across seven years and multiple club affiliations (FC Barcelona, then Playas de Castellón, then New Balance Team) speaks to the depth of that professional relationship.
The relay team she competes with — the collective of Spanish women who have turned the 4×400 into one of Europe’s most feared relay programmes — is also something she describes with particular warmth. “This championship, the relay worlds, we love it because we have a very good relationship among ourselves and it is a championship where only the relays go,” she said in 2025. “The connection is not only between us — with the entire technical staff the relationship is also magnificent.” That team culture, built over years of competing together through successive championships, is as much a part of the relay programme’s success as the individual times any one athlete runs.
Life Beyond the Track
Eva Santidrián’s story is, among other things, a story about combining two serious vocations simultaneously. She graduated with a degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics from the University of Valladolid in 2022 — the same year she won her first national 400m title — and subsequently completed a postgraduate degree focused on nutrition and epidemiology. The University of Valladolid published a profile of her in May 2025, noting her as a proud alumna of the institution, and describing how her arrival in Valladolid had been motivated precisely by the city’s ability to offer both serious coaching and serious academic infrastructure.
She has also won the Spanish University Athletics Championship in the 400 metres — a competition that runs parallel to the main RFEA championship structure and gives university-affiliated athletes a separate title to contest.
Away from the track, she describes herself as “a calm and funny girl,” someone who is initially reserved and shy but becomes more outgoing as trust develops. She enjoys time with family and friends, days at the beach, and quiet country walks — a Burgos childhood habit that has stayed with her into adulthood.
Her family has its own connection to the sport: Diego Santidrián, who has competed for the Atletismo Numantino club in the 400 metres and 4×400 relay, is her brother, giving the Santidrián household the relatively rare distinction of producing two competitive national-level track athletes simultaneously.
Personal Bests and Records (as of May 2026)
- 400 metres (outdoor): 51.35 — June 28, 2025, León, Spain
- 400 metres short track (indoor): 51.46 — February 23, 2025, Madrid, Spain (Spanish National Championships)
- 300 metres short track (indoor): 36.96 NR — January 18, 2025, Spain (Spanish absolute national record)
- 200 metres (outdoor): 23.21 — 2025
- 200 metres short track (indoor): 23.20 — 2025
- 60 metres: 7.61 — 2021–2022
- Long jump: 5.94 — 2015
- 4x400m relay (outdoor): 3:24.13 NR — May 11, 2025, Guangzhou, China (World Athletics Relays, Spanish national record)
- 4x400m relay short track: 3:25.68 NR — March 9, 2025, Apeldoorn, Netherlands (European Indoor Championships, Spanish national record)
Spanish National Championship Titles
- Sub-16 300m hurdles (indoor): 2014
- Sub-16 300m (outdoor): 2015
- Sub-16 300m (indoor): 2014–2015
- Sub-16 Long Jump (outdoor): 2015
- Sub-18 400m (outdoor): 2016
- Sub-18 400m (indoor): 2016
- Sub-23 200m (outdoor): 2021
- Sub-23 200m (indoor): 2021–2022
- Absolute 400m (outdoor): 2022, 2023
- Absolute 400m (indoor/short track): 2023, 2024
- University 400m: 2022
International Highlights
- World Athletics Relays 2025, Guangzhou: Gold, 4x400m (3:24.13, Spanish national record)
- Olympic Games 2024, Paris: 4x400m (5th in heat 1, 3:28.29)
- European Indoor Championships 2025, Apeldoorn: 4th, 4x400m short track (3:25.68 NR); semi-finalist, individual 400m (52.82)
- World Indoor Championships 2024, Glasgow: 5th in heat, 400m (53.07)
- European Championships 2024, Rome: 7th, 4x400m (3:26.94)
- European Championships 2022, Munich: 8th, 4x400m (3:29.70)
- World Athletics Championships 2025, Tokyo: 5th in heat, 4x400m (3:24.76)
- World Athletics Championships 2023, Budapest: 7th in heat, 4x400m (3:31.91)
- World Athletics Championships 2022, Eugene: 7th in heat, 4x400m (3:32.87); 4th in heat, 4x400m mixed (3:16.14)
- Ibero-American Championships 2022, La Nucía: Gold, 4x400m (3:31.72, Spanish sub-23 record)
- European Under-23 Championships 2021, Tallinn: Silver, 4x100m (43.74; 43.50 sub-23 NR in heats)
- European Under-18 Championships 2016, Tbilisi: 6th, 400m (56.08)
Social Media and Sponsorships
Eva Santidrián is active on Instagram under the handle @evasantiru, where she has accumulated over 47,000 followers. Her profile describes her as an Olympic athlete, sponsored by New Balance and Victory Endurance (“4 x Spanish Champion”). New Balance is her primary kit sponsor and club affiliation for 2026, representing one of the most prominent footwear and performance apparel relationships in Spanish athletics. Victory Endurance, a sports nutrition brand, is a secondary sponsor — a natural fit given her academic training in human nutrition and her professional interest in the science of athletic performance. Her World Athletics profile (athlete code 14645110) tracks her results at worldathletics.org.
Eva Santidrián Ruiz (born January 25, 2000, Burgos, Spain) competes for New Balance Team in the 400 metres and 4×400 relay. She trains under coach Juan Herrero Valentín and is registered with World Athletics (athlete code 14645110).
