His stunts have made him the most
famous pitch invader in the world – but, with the prospect of bankruptcy
looming, his actions have come at a cost.
Jimmy Jump, a 42-year-old Catalan
whose real name is Jaume Marquet i Cot, has disrupted international sports and
cultural events across the globe for at least the last decade. He now claims
that 50 per cent of his monthly income is being automatically channelled
through to unspecified legal authorities, in order to pay off the hundreds of thousands
of euros worth of fines collected due to his antics.
“I have no money,” he told the
website gazzetta.gr, “My total debt is around $350,000 (£220,000).” Mr Marquet i Cot first hit the
headlines when he staged a one-man invasion of the starting grid during the
parade lap of a Formula One grand prix at the Montmelo circuit near his
birthplace of Sabadell, a town in Barcelona’s industrial hinterland. A diehard
Barcelona fan, Mr Marquet i Cot then became a somewhat tediously regular, if
uninvited feature of many of that team’s fixtures, invariably wearing his
trademark barretina.
Perhaps the “highpoint” of his
career, though, came at the 2010 World Cup. Mr Marquet i Cot covered the trophy
with one of his barretinas minutes before the Spanish and Dutch finalists took
to the pitch.
Also that year, he managed to
find his way onto the stage during the Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, barretina and all.
“Normally they look at you and
say ‘sorry I have to do this’, but this guy looked at me and I was not sure
what he wanted. He seemed to want to give me something.” – in Mr Marquet i
Cot’s case, a barretina.
On his website, Mr Marquet i Cot
says his predilection for barretines is due to the red Phrygian caps’
popularity amongst 1789 French revolutionaries, making them a symbol of
liberty. He wishes, he writes, “to communicate the freedom of expression in an
world which is increasingly under the control of the media”.
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