Laura Bueno Fernández: Spain’s Queen of the 400 Metres

By all available measures, Laura María Bueno Fernández is the finest 400-metre runner Spain has produced in a generation — a ten-time national champion, Olympic relay competitor, and multi-time Spanish national record holder whose career has been built through a combination of natural talent, granite-hard resilience, and an almost three-decade partnership with the same coach who first spotted her racing around a schoolyard in Granada.

Roots: Granada, an Impatient Child, and a Grandfather’s Tip

Laura María Bueno Fernández was born on 25 May 1993 in Granada, the historic city in Andalusia that sits beneath the snow-capped Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. By her own account she was, from her earliest days, an irrepressible bundle of energy — puro nervio (pure nerve), as she puts it — and her parents quickly concluded that some organised outlet for that energy was going to be a necessity.

They tried ballet. They tried swimming. Neither took. What would take hold instead came about because of a casual conversation between her grandfather, Pepe, and a man named Jesús Montiel in the playground of the Colegio Luis Rosales, the primary school where young Laura was then studying. Montiel — himself a respected coach who would go on to train some of Spain’s finest middle-distance and sprint talent — heard Pepe’s proud declaration that his granddaughter could really run. He did not dismiss the boast. Instead, he walked over to Laura that day and invited her to come and try a session at the Estadio de la Juventud, Granada’s main athletics venue.

That afternoon changed the trajectory of her life. She went home brimming with excitement, her parents said yes, and she has never looked back. She began training under Montiel at approximately seven years of age, and the two have been together ever since — a partnership now spanning more than two decades and counting.

Her early competitive life followed a path that would have been familiar to many talented young Andalusian runners: first cross-country, where she won two prestigious platos internacionales at the Itálica cross-country meeting, one of Spain’s most celebrated grassroots competitions. From there the natural progression took her to the track, initially testing herself in the Campeonatos de Andalucía in the triathlon-style multi-discipline events common in Spanish youth athletics, before settling into the 500-metre and then 600-metre distances that were her age-group specialties.

That early passage through the middle distances — a feature of Spanish youth athletics development — would later prove meaningful. It instilled in Bueno the kind of basic aerobic endurance and tactical awareness that purely sprint-focused programmes do not always cultivate, and it gave her the raw material for an extraordinary collection of national records in the “metric” middle distances that she would accumulate as a senior athlete. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Youth Career: Titles at Every Age Group

The first sign that Bueno was more than a promising regional prospect came in 2007, when, still a teenager competing in the cadete (under-16) category, she won the Spanish indoor championship title at 600 metres at a meet held in Valencia. That result — her first national title — came when she was just 14 years old, and she has described it with undiminished fondness ever since as an almost surreally vivid memory.

Throughout her junior years she competed under the colours of Ciudad de Granada, the club that serves as the main competitive home for athletes based in the city. Her development was steady and purposeful rather than explosive: Montiel, whose coaching philosophy is grounded in patience and long-term athletic construction, made sure she was never rushed toward distances or intensities that were beyond her development stage.

By 2012, now competing in the junior (under-20) category and having settled definitively on the 400 metres as her primary event, she won the Spanish junior outdoor title in Avilés. The following year, stepping up to the sub-23 (under-23) age group, she confirmed her status as the best young 400-metre runner in Spain by winning the national sub-23 outdoor championship in Mataró. A year later, in 2014, she placed second at the sub-23 championships in Durango and fifth at the senior national outdoor championships in Alcobendas — results that announced a serious senior contender in the making.

The Senior Breakthrough: National Dominance from 2016

Bueno’s transition into Spain’s elite absolute tier was, like many things in her career, not smooth in a straight line, but ultimately decisive. In 2016, now competing for A.D. Marathon, she made her international debut representing Spain at the Ibero-American Athletics Championships in Rio de Janeiro, where she helped the Spanish 4×400 relay squad to a silver medal — the fastest split of the entire relay, by her own account. Weeks later she appeared in her first European Athletics Championships, in Amsterdam, reaching the first round of the individual 400 metres (54.01) and the relay heat.

That international debut was the validation she had been working toward, but it also sharpened her competitive instincts considerably. She has spoken candidly about the frustration of finishing second at the Ibero-Americans — “to win you have to know how to suffer and also how to lose,” she said at the time — and the experience left her with something to prove.

What followed over the next three years constitutes perhaps the most brilliant stretch of domestic dominance by any Spanish 400-metre runner of her era. After joining Valencia Esports (which later became Valencia Club de Atletismo, and then Diputació Valencia C.A.) ahead of the 2017 season, Bueno went on an extraordinary run of national championship victories. She won both the indoor title in Salamanca and the outdoor title in Barcelona in 2017 — the first time she had won both in the same year — and she has described those moments with characteristic vividness: “Nadie me coge, nadie me coge, el oro es mío” (“Nobody’s catching me, nobody’s catching me, the gold is mine”) were the words running through her head in the final 50 metres of her first major national title.

She won the national indoor crown again in 2018 — this time in Valencia — and the outdoor title in Getafe that summer, where she recorded a time of 52.14 seconds to set a new personal best and position herself as comfortably the best pure 400-metre specialist in Spain. 2019 brought a third consecutive indoor crown, won in Antequera in February, where she also broke the Spanish national record over 600 metres indoors (1:28.14), surpassing a mark previously held by Esther Guerrero. Together with the Spanish outdoor record over 600 metres (1:26.21, set in Barcelona in July 2018) and the indoor and outdoor national records at 500 metres, Bueno had quietly assembled an extraordinary collection of Spanish records at the “exotic” metric distances that her training regularly required her to race.

On the international stage her progress was equally encouraging, if not quite translated into finals appearances. She was a semifinalist at the European Indoor Championships in Belgrade in 2017, a quarterfinalist at the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham in 2018 (where she ran 53.66), a semifinalist at the European Outdoor Championships in Berlin that summer, and a bronze medallist in the individual 400 metres at the Ibero-American Championships in Trujillo, Peru, in 2018. In March 2019 in Glasgow, at the European Indoor Championships, she reached the semifinal, clocking a then-personal best of 52.67 seconds — breaking the psychologically important 53-second barrier for the first time on an indoor track.

Throughout this period she continued to base herself in Granada and train daily at the Estadio de la Juventud under Montiel, commuting her club registration to Valencia without relocating her daily life. She has spoken warmly about that arrangement — about the privilege of training on the same track that first inspired her as a child, and about the support network she has built over the years in her hometown. She described Montiel with affection as something like a military commander in terms of discipline, but fundamentally a person of deep care: “the train that guides me toward success and I am the engine that provides the will to get there,” was how she once characterised their relationship.

Injury, Perseverance, and the Long Road to Tokyo

The years 2019 and 2020 tested Bueno’s resolve to its limits. Following a brilliant early-2019 indoor season, she suffered a tibial bone oedema (edema) — five centimetres long by two millimetres deep — that prevented her from running for months. She described that period with striking honesty: unable to run, reduced to training on the elliptical machine and the stationary bicycle, and fighting above all against the mental toll of watching competitions she had prepared for pass by without her. “What I’m struggling with most is my head,” she said, “so that psychologically it doesn’t affect me more than it should.”

That same capacity for candour about pain and difficulty would resurface later. Around 2020, a year already disrupted for all athletes by the COVID-19 pandemic, she underwent surgery on plantar fascia — a particularly challenging procedure with a long and difficult rehabilitation. She has spoken of the four months between the operation and her return to training as an authentic calvary, both physically and mentally, and described the emotional weight of the recovery in terms that resonate far beyond sport.

But she came back. In June 2021, with the Tokyo Olympics now postponed by a year to that summer, Bueno won the national outdoor championship in Getafe in 52.02 seconds — a time that confirmed not only her full recovery but her continued status as Spain’s pre-eminent 400-metre runner, and that earned her selection for the Spanish team competing in the debut of the mixed 4×400 relay at the Olympic Games.

Olympic Debut: Tokyo 2020 and a Spanish Record

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games — held in the summer of 2021 — represented the culmination of more than a decade of aspiration, injury, perseverance, and renewal. Bueno competed as part of the Spanish mixed 4×400 relay squad alongside teammates Aauri Bokesa, Samuel García, and Bernat Erta in what was the first-ever appearance of this relay format on an Olympic programme.

The Spanish quartet ran brilliantly. Finishing sixth in their first-round heat with a time of 3:13.29, they set a new Spanish national record in the event — a mark that briefly seemed to be enough to carry Spain through to the Olympic final as one of the fastest non-automatic qualifiers. The drama that followed was wrenching: initial disqualifications of the United States and Dominican Republic crews appeared to advance Spain to a final position, a hope that was then extinguished when both countries successfully challenged their disqualifications. Spain were ultimately classified tenth overall — a painful administrative denouement to an outstanding athletic performance.

Bueno’s Olympic experience and her role in setting that national record were nonetheless celebrated back home with justified pride. She was honoured at official ceremonies in Granada for her Olympic participation, and she was named madrina (ambassador) of multiple local charity running events in the years that followed — a recognition of her status as the city’s best-known active track athlete.

Post-Tokyo: Relay Veteran and Sustained Excellence

Following Tokyo, Bueno has continued as a cornerstone of Spain’s relay squads — now widely recognised as the captain of the women’s 4×400 relay team — while also remaining competitive as an individual 400-metre runner on the domestic circuit.

At the 2022 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Belgrade, she was part of the Spanish 4×400 women’s relay team that reached the heats. In 2023, she appeared at the European Games in Kraków-Małopolska, competing in both the individual 400 metres (53.38, 24th) and the mixed 4×400 relay (3:16.79, 15th), as well as representing Spain at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, where the women’s 4×400 relay placed 15th in the heats with a time of 3:31.91. The 2024 World Athletics Relays in Nassau, Bahamas, saw the Spanish women’s relay team reach the first round, clocking 3:31.03 and finishing 14th overall in their heat.

A significant personal milestone arrived on 3 June 2021, when she ran her outdoor personal best of 51.93 seconds — a time that confirmed her place among the very best Spanish 400-metre runners of all time and established her as a credible performer at the highest international level in the individual event.

On the domestic front, she had recorded a personal best of 52.02 in the 2021 national championships and, having accumulated titles across 2017–2019 (three consecutive indoor) and 2017–2018 and 2021 (outdoor), her final tally of Spanish absolute national titles stands at ten across indoor and outdoor combined — an exceptional achievement that places her among the most decorated quarter-milers in the history of Spanish women’s athletics. Per her social media biography, she is a ten-time Spanish champion (x10 Campeona de España).

Across her senior national career, the full list of individual outdoor 400-metre national titles includes victories in 2017 (Barcelona), 2018 (Getafe), and 2021 (Getafe), with indoor titles claimed in 2017 (Salamanca), 2018 (Valencia), and 2019 (Antequera). Her club home through most of this period has been Valencia Esports — rebranded in 2020 as Valencia Club de Atletismo and more recently as Diputació Valencia Club Atletisme (also known as Valencia Terra i Mar) — though she has always lived and trained in Granada.

Personal Bests and National Records

Bueno’s résumé as a record-holder is wider than the 400 metres alone. At the time of writing her established personal bests and national records include:

• 400m (outdoor): 51.93 (June 2021, Getafe) — seventh-fastest time in Spanish women’s history at the time it was set
• 400m (short track/indoor): 52.67 (March 2019, Glasgow) — set at the European Indoor Championships
• 300m (outdoor): 38.41 (2018) — Spanish national record
• 500m (outdoor): 1:10.63 (2017) — Spanish national record
• 500m (indoor): 1:11.33 (December 2018) — Spanish national record
• 600m (outdoor): 1:26.21 (July 2018, Barcelona) — Spanish national record
• 600m (indoor): 1:28.14 (February 2019, Antequera) — Spanish national record
• 4×400m relay (mixed): 3:13.29 (July 2021, Tokyo) — Spanish national record
• 4×400m relay (women’s): 3:29.90 (June 2023)

The cluster of national records at 300m, 500m, and 600m reflects the reality of elite 400-metre training: the event requires strong aerobic conditioning, and athletes who train for it regularly race at these “metric” distances in the winter circuit. That Bueno holds all of Spain’s best times at those distances is a direct testament to the breadth and quality of her athletic development under Montiel.

Her height is listed at 1.72 metres, with a competition weight of approximately 61 kilograms.

The Coach Behind the Career

No account of Laura Bueno’s career would be complete without substantial acknowledgment of Jesús Montiel Gómez, the man who has coached her from the age of seven to the present day. Montiel — whose coaching career has also produced Ignacio Fontes, one of Spain’s most exciting middle-distance prospects — is based in Granada and combines coaching with academic work as an adjunct professor at the Centro de Magisterio La Inmaculada affiliated with the Universidad de Granada. He was named best coach at a prestigious national athletics gala held in Jaén in 2021, in recognition of the achievements of the athletes under his care.

The Montiel-Bueno partnership has endured through injuries, pandemic disruptions, club changes, and the inevitable fluctuations of a long career, and its durability says something about the trust and communication between them. Bueno has described his sessions as demanding — “like an ex-lieutenant colonel, he keeps us all standing to attention” — but always grounded in genuine care for the athletes he trains. She has called him the single indispensable element of everything she has achieved.

Personal Life, Character, and Community Presence

Away from the track, Bueno remains firmly rooted in Granada. She is, by her own description, someone who finds in athletics a form of liberation: “putting on my shoes and going out to train frees me from the tensions of the whole day — I go happily. My passion is competing.” That passion coexists with a clear-eyed realism about the sport’s demands and its costs, particularly in terms of injury, and she has been unusually open on social media about difficult periods in her career.

In a particularly resonant series of posts on her social media accounts, she shared video footage of her recovery from plantar fascia surgery — describing the four months that followed as a genuine ordeal — and expressed deep gratitude to the team that supported her: her physiotherapists at Fisioterapia Nutriclinic, her nutritionist at Nutritrainclinic, her psychologist at Clínica Inspira, her podiatrist at Podología Aquiles, and her manager at PinedaSport, alongside her family and Montiel himself.

Her connection to Granada extends beyond individual achievement. She has been a madrina — a patron and figurehead — of a long-running charitable road race in the city, has received formal recognition from the Granada municipal authorities for her Olympic participation, and was honoured by the National Police (whose cause she has supported) in 2019. She has described herself as someone who loves the mirador viewpoints above the city and the beach, whose musical tastes run to Whitney Houston, Bill Withers, and Europe, and whose favourite film is the track-and-field epic Chariots of Fire, alongside the score of Gladiator — “they make me imagine beautiful things.”

She holds a qualification from the Unisport Management School in addition to her primary education, indicating a commitment to professional development that extends beyond the track. That broader education will likely prove relevant as she eventually transitions into the next phase of her career, whether as a coach, administrator, or ambassador for the sport she has served so well.

Sponsorship and Social Media

For a significant portion of her peak competitive years — specifically from 2018 through 2021 — Bueno was sponsored by Nike, who provided her competition kit. She has spoken warmly of the brand’s support during that period.

She maintains an active presence on social media under the handle @labf93 on both Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), where her biography describes her as an Olympic athlete and holder of the Spanish national records over 600 metres outdoor (1:26.21) and indoor (1:28.14), 500 metres indoor (1:11.33) and outdoor (1:10.63), and ten-time Spanish champion. Her Instagram account (@Labfdez) offers a more personal window into her training, recovery, and competitive life. She also has a professional profile on LinkedIn, where she is listed as a member of the Club de Atletismo Valencia Terra i Mar.

A Career in Context: Where Bueno Stands in Spanish Athletics History

To appreciate what Bueno has accomplished, it helps to place her within the longer history of Spanish women’s quarter-miling. The 400 metres has produced a number of distinguished Spanish women’s performers across the decades, but very few have combined the consistency of domestic dominance with the durability of an international career that Bueno has managed.

Her personal best of 51.93 seconds represents a time that puts her among the fastest Spanish women ever at the distance. The collection of national records across the 300m, 500m, and 600m distances speaks to an all-around quality rarely seen. And the ten national senior title is, by any standard, an extraordinary achievement in a country with a deep pool of competitive 400-metre talent.

That she achieved all of this while training not at a national high-performance centre but at a municipal stadium in her hometown, without uprooting her life or her support network, makes the story all the more compelling. Spanish athletics has sometimes struggled to nurture talent outside the main performance hubs in Madrid and Valencia, and Bueno’s career stands as proof that world-class development is possible from almost anywhere, given the right coach and the right athlete.

Her Olympic selection in 2021 — the culmination of years of ambition, expressed openly in interviews as early as 2019 — validated a career that had weathered injuries, setbacks, and the particular cruelty of near-misses. Her X (Twitter) biography, which still proudly lists the five national records she holds and her status as Olympic athlete, reflects the pride of someone who knows exactly how much the journey cost and how much it has been worth.

International Career Summary

Personal Bests at a Glance

Social Media & Contact

• Instagram: @Labfdez
• X (Twitter): @labf93
• Current club: Diputació Valencia Club Atletisme (also known as Valencia Club de Atletismo / Valencia Terra i Mar)
• Coach: Jesús Montiel Gómez
• Training base: Estadio de la Juventud, Granada
• World Athletics profile code: 14480464

Laura Bueno Fernández is one of Spanish athletics’ most complete and durable performers of her generation — a woman who has won national titles across four consecutive years, set national records across five different events, competed at an Olympic Games, and done all of it while remaining true to her roots in Granada. Her story, from the schoolyard where her grandfather boasted about her running to the Olympic track in Tokyo, is as good a case study as the sport offers in what patience, consistency, and genuine love for an event can produce.