Nothing sad about it at all, Regina was awesome yesterday and her finish was clearly full of happiness
Like Bruna said yesterday, Regina qualifying for the Olympics was one of the highlights of the entire qualifying period. For so many years she had been ridiculed and laughed at by athletes even from small countries, because 'her technique is bad', 'she is never gonna make it' and so on. Then in Trondheim last year she basically gave a big fuck you to all of them and qualified fair and square with an amazing race
Bruna, Sami and Regina often hang out together in the Olympic accomodation, eat together, have fun together and so on, and they had made a deal together that they would wait for each other at the finish, no matter if there was 5 minutes or 50 minutes between their finishing times
I don't know if it was possible to hear, but when Regina finished, Bruna was yelling at her "You are an Olympian! You are an Olympian!!!"
And then coincidence got massive: when we (my dad and sister and Bruna's parents) were on the way back to the car, we ran into some people with Regina Martinez caps and such (there were a few of these groups), got talking to them.....turns out it was Regina's mother My dad and her spent a bit of time connecting their phones to share some photos he had (or a video of her finish, not sure), she was very happy with it!