OLYMPICS-LATAM: Overall Poor Performance Blamed on Lack of State Support

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Aug 30 2004 (IPS) - Latin America chalked up several outstanding victories in the Olympic Games in Athens. But with the exception of Cuba, the region’s overall performance was low, which analysts attribute to poor state support for sports.

Just 63 of the nearly 1,000 medals awarded in Greece went to Latin American athletes, and only 21 of them were gold. Cuba, as usual, led the pack, with 27 medals, followed by Brazil, which took 10.

Cuba’s performance prompted the president of the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation, Humberto Rodríguez, to say that the Cuban delegation proudly lived up to "its commitment to the people" in the Athens 2004 games, which ended Sunday.

Nevertheless, he said the country’s results "do not mean we are satisfied." According to Rodríguez, "We can aspire to much more in Beijing" in 2008.

Cuba placed 11th in the Olympic medal ranking, with nine gold, seven silver and 11 bronze medals, thus making it the leader in the developing world. Ahead of Cuba were the United States, China, Russia, Australia, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, South Korea and Britain.

The Cuban state funnels more than 100 million dollars a year into sports, from physical education and the grooming of talent in schools to high-performance athletic centres.

Argentina, with a total of six medals, took gold in men’s football as well as basketball, where it beat the powerful and often undefeatable U.S. team, which led to a national outburst of joy even greater than the celebration of the victory in football.

Argentina thus became the second country in Latin America to win the gold medal in men’s football in the Olympics, after Uruguay’s victories in 1924 and 1928.

Chile saw its own wild festivities when tennis players Nicolás Massú and Fernando González brought it the only two gold medals in its Olympic history.

Mexico, however, where the sports officials in the government of Vicente Fox promised at least a dozen medals, only took three silver and one bronze – a performance that experts described as disappointing, and which prompted calls for an urgent modification in public sports policies.

After coming in last in the semifinal qualifiers in butterfly, the Mexican swimmer blamed his swimsuit, saying "I wasn’t used to it."

Mexican beach volleyball player Hilda Gaxiola, meanwhile, said it was the "desire to win that made us fail," after she and her partner lost every match. Others blamed their nerves.

But nearly all of the 114 athletes sent to the games by Mexico complained of the lack of official support, even though the state invested around 20 million dollars in their training, and their participation in Athens.

In Chile, as in Mexico, sports commentators made it clear that the medal-winners basically owed their performance to their own individual efforts and family support, rather than on state policies of backing for high-competition sports, in which money may be available, but planning and monitoring of athletes are lacking.

Brazil took home four gold medals, three silver and three bronze – its best overall performance ever.

But journalists said the silver medal won by the women’s football team "belongs to them, not Brazil", in reference to the scarce state support they received.

It was also a Brazilian athlete who suffered one of the worst injustices in Athens 2004, when marathon runner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, who was heading the race at the 36th kilometre mark with a 25-second lead, was pushed off the road by a spectator in the worst security breach of the games.

Cordeiro de Lima took bronze, but experts say the attack may very well have cost him the gold medal.

In the 1990s, Brazil created a Sports Ministry. Until then, sports was merely a neglected area in the Education Ministry. In South America’s giant, public sports policies are mainly based on the sponsoring of athletes by public enterprises and tax breaks for private companies that sponsor athletes.

In addition, only recently was a programme created to incorporate sports in schools and bring physical education to the population at large.

But funding is still limited, and sponsors only show up once an athlete has demonstrated exceptional talent, experts complain.

Uruguay, whose Ministry of Sports and Youth was created in 2000, did not win a single medal in Athens, although it sent 15 athletes to compete in track and field, canoe, cycling, swimming, rowing and sailing.

Uruguay’s hopes were pinned on cyclist Milton Wynants, who won the silver medal in Sydney in 2000. But in Athens he placed ninth in the men’s points race.

His triumph in Sydney was especially admired because due to the lack of official support he had to stay at the home of fellow Uruguayans while training before the games, and competed with a modest bicycle that he had purchased with his own money.

In the World Cycling Championship in May in Melbourne, Australia, he and his trainer entered the training stadiums by posing as spectators, because using the track cost 200 dollars, which they could not afford. They would dismantle the bicycle and put it back together again once they were inside, Wynants later explained.

"The history of Mexico, Uruguay or any other country of Latin America is similar in any Olympic Games, with the exception of Cuba. There is no official policy of support for sports, and if there is any, it is lost among the bureaucrats" and red tape, Carlos Velarde, a doctor who specialises in sports medicine, told IPS.

Paraguay won its first Olympic medal ever – silver – by making it to the final football match, which it lost to Argentina. Venezuela also won its first medals: two bronze.

In Venezuela, "the state follows a model like the Cuban one, of producing talent in the schools. But we don’t have a well-organised structure for continued sports development. Each athlete continues however they can," Cándido Pérez, a sports journalist who has been covering international competitions for 30 years, commented to IPS.

In Velarde’s view, "with the exception of Cuba, true interest in sports does not exist in Latin America, and that is demonstrated when we get to the Olympics, where a few stand out but more because of their personal effort and sacrifice than state support."

The physician cited the examples of Dominican runner Félix Sánchez, who took the gold medal in the men’s 400-metre hurdles race, to bring his country its first gold medal ever, and Mexico’s Ana Guevara, who took silver in the women’s 400-metre run.

Both Sánchez and Guevara, who are now receiving support from private companies, emerged as elite athletes with virtually no backing from the state.

* With reporting from Mario Osava in Brazil, Humberto Márquez in Venezuela and Raúl Pierri in Uruguay.