Spanish sport is without gold and without a model
In September, millions of parents in Spain will have to decide which sport they want their young children to take part in. Judo, karate, hockey, handball, gymnastics, skating, swimming... or football. For any of the first ones they will have difficulties because there are not enough children, because they are expensive, because there is no regulated competition, because there is no modality for girls... but for football they will not have so many problems. Categories, equipment, travel, grass pitches, their own changing rooms... this is the model of sport in Spain. Football has devastated everything. Boys want to be footballers and modern feminism has imposed that girls also want to be footballers. This is another problem that should be written about at length. How women's football has become unnaturally inflated because it wants to be a social claim for gender equality.
Spain returns from Tokyo 2020 with 17 medals, three golds, eight silvers, six bronzes and 40 Olympic diplomas, that is, there are 40 athletes who are among the top eight in their disciplines. It is true that the Spanish Olympic Committee's participation could have ended with more medals. Rafa Nadal, Jon Rahm, Carolina Marín, Orlando Ortega... could have given more, but due to injuries, the calendar or the COVID-19, they did not participate. Nadal declined to go to the Olympic Games because his body is already living at the limit and Jon Rahm was left without competing because of Japan's atrocious fear of COVID-19 and because the International Olympic Committee did not review the protocols in case of infection after completing the vaccination schedule. They should not have treated the Spanish golfer as an infected person when he was vaccinated because the message you send to society is confusing.
Team sport rules in Spain. We like to win together or not win. We have dominated in basketball, football, water polo, handball... In Tokyo we went through the trance of seeing the end of the best basketball generation the country has ever produced. Football should never have been an Olympic event because it already has enough showcase for the rest of the year and the media treatment is not appropriate for an Olympic event. In water polo and handball we live on the miracle that there are kids who want to dedicate themselves to these sports when they live surrounded by football and know that this is not a good way to make a living.
In individual sports there is a gulf between them and in comparison with other countries. Tennis or golf, where Rahm or Nadal can live comfortably on their merits and we hear about them in the media throughout the year, are not the same as sports like judo, badminton, canoeing or even athletics, which we know more about because of MasterChef than because of their participations.
The Olympic Sports Association (ADO) was created in 1988 to guarantee decent economic and training conditions for Spanish professional sportsmen and women. The COE, the Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD) and RTVE make up this programme, which reached its peak with the 22 medals won at Barcelona 92. Since then, it has allowed athletes to compete and perform at the highest level, but Tokyo 2020 must serve as a wake-up call to review the model and look beyond our borders. Great Britain (64), the Netherlands (36), Germany (37), Italy (40), France (32) and even Cuba with 15 medals and seven golds are above Spain in the Tokyo medal table. We have to compare ourselves with all these countries and analyse why they won so many medals. Apart from that, there is the United States or China with their developed sports programmes that we will never reach in Spain.
It is a cultural problem that we must accept. American kids have a guaranteed sporting career while they study. School and university sports are followed by thousands of fans and by the media. They have professional leagues organised in the calendar so that fans can enjoy their teams in the NBA, NFL, MLB or MLS. In the case of China, there is a political component to add to all that.
In Spain we should not even aspire to that. We have to accept it and not deny it. But the COE must reinforce the means for children to want to be gymnasts or hockey players. Get the federations to go into schools and gyms and polish the diamonds that end up frustrated every year, abandoning the sport or, worse, forced to play football because there they do have space and means, although they don't make it to professional level either because the sport is collapsed. Parents do their part to an extent that we could even reproach. In Madrid there are cases of courageous mothers who dedicate themselves every September to calling their children's friends to form a roller hockey team so that they don't sign up for football. They buy sticks, skates and protections and demand from the town hall hours a week to use a rink that the council itself doesn't even know what it's for. Then come the trips, the matches, the deplorable conditions of the rinks... A child from Madrid cannot play hockey if he or she is not born in Catalonia? A girl from Murcia who trains to become a gymnast must have an environment that nurtures her skills and offers her the chance to compete in her environment and, one day, that environment must provide her with the tools to leave her home and live while she trains and competes. She cannot be dependent on scholarships and plans that are awarded for her sporting merits and then disappear at some point in her life because her physique is no longer suitable for the sport. And another problem, you have to compete and you have to win. We are specialists in vilifying coaches for demanding too much from their pupils. The case of Anna Tarrés with synchronised swimming was an example of how society judged a behaviour that should only have been assessed by the Federation and the COE because the elite demand it.
Italy's role in the Tokyo Olympics is due to a very curious model based on offering a life model to the professional athlete. A career in the fire brigade, police or army that allows them to train and, in the future, to be active and earn a living in that profession. Financial peace of mind. It is another type of culture, different from the American one, but which allows the media to open up to other sports during the Olympics.
In Spain, the media talk about football 11 months of the year. For one month they devote themselves to the transfer market. They boast of dedicating time to minority sports, but they do so when a Spanish team wins and at the end of their time slots because what interests them is football. Or is football interesting because it is what they dedicate most time to? Nobody has noticed that Spain has had a presence in baseball for the Tokyo games. The national team has not qualified, but we have had three representatives who should be mentioned before they fall into eternal anonymity: Itziar Galarraga, head of baseball and softball results management, Susana Santos, official scorer, and Pablo Carpio, director of Baseball Scoring.
There is room for improvement for Paris 2024. Olympic diplomas can be turned into medals and athletics has improved a lot after the debacle of the last few years with the internal wars in the Federation. But one more step remains to be taken to make children want to be athletes, to make professional sport worthwhile.