‘Team Spain’ leaves the Games without breaking the Barcelona ceiling despite the historic investment of almost 1,000 million by the Government
Athletics and canoeing propelled him to fifteenth place in the medal table with 18 ‘metals’, one more than in Tokyo 2020
PARIS, Aug. 12 (by EUROPA PRESS special correspondent Gaspar Díez) –
Paris extinguished the cauldron of the Games in which ‘Team Spain’ packed up without breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ of the 22 medals from Barcelona’92, with 18, one of them the bronze in the K-4 with which Saúl Craviotto is now the Spaniard with the most medals, those of Carolina Marín’s broken tears and those of a revolution postponed until, at least, Los Angeles 2028.
The Games of Parity, in which, for the first time, more Spanish female athletes (193) than male (190) travelled, reduced optimism about the Spanish sporting model and this postponed revolution. “It is not the expected result, but this is sport,” said the president of the COE, Alejandro Blanco, at the Casa de España this Sunday at the time of the assessment.
Those 18 medals, some of them as lustrous as the gold of football 32 years after the one won at Camp Nou with that goal by Kiko, and the 9 fourth places seem like a small prize for the largest investment in history by the Spanish Government, the nearly 1 billion announced by President Pedro Sánchez to face the post-pandemic period. “Spain is the country with the best coefficient between sporting results and investment,” says Blanco.
From 2022 to 2024, the CSD budget exceeded 950 million and the CSD Team Spain program allocated 50 million to expand scholarships for athletes from the exhausted ADO Plan. Athletes such as the former Olympic champion in Rio, Carolina Marín, had all the necessary means at their disposal, such as Asian sparring partners, two of them, in the attempt by the Huelva native to revalidate her Olympic gold, resources to compete abroad, high-altitude training camps, technicians, big data and AI databases and, among others, hypoxia chambers with which to oxygenate their blood to maximize their performance.
This manna translated into results that fed the predictions of the president of the COE and also of the head of the CSD, José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, who reiterated again and again in their statements that the 22 medals from Barcelona’92 would already be a thing of the past.
These calculations were not made at random. The reports prepared by the technicians of the two ‘houses of Spanish sport’ supported their arguments: in 2023, Spanish athletes won 63 medals at World and European Championships. The count for the pre-Olympic years prior to Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 20216 and Tokyo 2020 was close to 40. If there was more money than ever and the medals were pouring in at World Championships like last year’s athletics championship in Budapest, with the double gold of Álvaro Martín and María Pérez in the 20 and 35 kilometre walk, and the silver of Mo Katir (sanctioned later) in the 5000, that is where the problem (sporting or mental) has been in Paris 2024.
“If this were pure mathematics, it wouldn’t be the Games,” stressed Blanco. However, it was precisely athletics, with the gold medals of triple jumper Jordan Díaz and the mixed marathon race walker, together with the silver medals of Pérez and the bronze medals of Martín in the 20K, and the three bronze medals of the canoeists at the Nautical Stadium in Vaires-sur-Marne, that have propelled Spanish sport to fifteenth place in the medal table, seven places better than in Tokyo.
Saúl Craviotto’s bronze in the K-4, alongside Marcus Cooper, Carlos Arévalo and Rodrigo Germade, was one of the positive notes of Paris 2024, which will go down in the history books, as the Lérida native became the Spanish athlete with the most medals at the Games, with six – two golds, two silvers and two bronzes -, tying former paddler David Cal.
PRESSURE AND THE MENTAL ISSUE
More good news was the silver in 3×3 basketball, which covered up the din of the men’s teams, in which Rudy Fernández said goodbye to his sixth Games, and the women’s gold, which was missing in women’s water polo, the second in the history of a women’s team after field hockey in 1992, and the bronze in artistic swimming, which covered up the disappointments of sprinter Hugo González in the pool at La Défense.
Boxing, with the silver and bronze of Rafa ‘Balita’ Lozano’s pupils Ayoub Ghadfa and Enmanuel Reyes, made up for other defeats, those of Rafa Nadal, Jon Rahm, the women’s football team, the gymnast Ray Zapata, the triple jumper Ana Peleteiro, the taekwondo athlete Adriana Cerezo or the paddlers Marcus Cooper, Antía Jácome and María Corbera.
In the Games of other farewells apart from Nadal’s and the possible farewell of Marín and his heartbreaking tears, Pablo Herrera became the player with the most Games in history, surpassing the Brazilian Emanuel Rego who beat him in the final on Faliro beach in his debut in Athens 2004 together with Xavi Bosma, and Teresa Portela competed in the seventh, one behind the race walker ‘Chuso’ García Bragado. “I don’t set an expiry date for myself,” said the Galician, however.
With 409 million euros invested in Olympic preparation by the federations, the results in Paris have not met the expectations of the directors. Some of them point to a question of a failure in mental preparation or excessive pressure from the authorities. “If they didn’t know how to withstand that pressure they wouldn’t be here, the pressure is put on them,” says Blanco.
The bronze medal of the ‘Hispanos’ with a team under construction, a mix of the past and the future to come, on the closing day of Paris 2024 is a ray of light in the storm. The water has already blurred the opening ceremony of the Games on the Seine, those of the humble record holder Craviotto, the tears of Marín and the photo of Nadal and Alcaraz of a Spanish sport that faces, without myths like Rafa himself, Pau Gasol, Lydia Valentín or Mireia Belmonte, this generational change and an unfinished revolution.