MADRID, 17 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Inclusive Games, organized by the Sanitas Foundation, held their second edition this Thursday in Madrid, much larger both in participation, with almost 300 athletes with or without disabilities and also from other countries, as well as in the developed modalities, which meant “a historic day for sport.”
As three years ago, the High Performance Center of the Higher Sports Council was the setting for this event, which had a greater participation compared to 2021, where 170 athletes gathered, and who competed under inclusive regulations in athletics, triathlon, handball, wheelchair basketball, table tennis, fencing, badminton, rugby, hockey, archery, swimming, karate, taekwondo and judo, five more than three years ago.
Furthermore, on this occasion, the message of inclusion was even more global thanks to the presence of athletes not only from Spain, but from countries such as Chile, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Poland, and also with many of them as protagonists of the last Olympic Games. and last summer’s Paris Paralympics.
During this Thursday, Paralympic athletes competed such as swimmers Teresa Perales, winner of 28 Paralympic medals, María Delgado, double medalist in Paris 2024, or wheelchair basketball player Ignacio ‘Pincho’ Ortega, along with Olympians such as África Zamorano (swimming ), Clara Azurmendi (badminton) or the taekwondo players Cecilia Castro and Javier Pérez Polo, in addition to former athletes such as Felipe Reyes and Iñaki de Miguel, who competed in chair basketball, and athletes such as Saúl Craviotto and Carolina Marín, or the men’s national coach of basketball, Sergio Scariolo, who gave their support to these Inclusive Games.
Among the international athletes were the Chilean archer María Elena Adelina, the Mexican taekwondo player Jessica Berenice García Quijano, the British athlete Emmanuel Temitayo Oyinbo Coker, the fencer Adrian Castro and the athlete Robert Jan Pawlak, both from Poland, athletes also from Brazil like Alan Fonteles, accompanied by Marcelo Nogueira, and from Ecuador like Erick Tandazo, or the number one in parabadminton Sukant Kadam, from India.
An initiative that continued to receive the support of the main Spanish sports institutions with the presence of José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, Miguel Carballeda and Alejandro Blanco, presidents of the Higher Sports Council (CSD), Spanish Paralympic Committee (CPE) and Spanish Olympic Committee (COE). ), respectively, organizations all of them signatories of the ‘Alliance for Inclusive Sports’.
Furthermore, in this second edition, Fundación Sanitas brought together, in addition to the aforementioned Teresa Perales, four award-winning former athletes such as Jonathan Edwards, former British athlete who holds the world record in triple jump and Olympic champion in Sydney 2000; Javier Sotomayor, former Cuban jumper who holds the world record for high jump and Olympic gold in Barcelona’92; Nadia Comaneci, former Romanian gymnast who was the first to obtain ten points in an Olympic competition (Melbourne ’76) and five-time Olympic champion; and Hicham El Guerrouj, winner of two golds in Athens 2004 in 1,500 and 5,000 m.
“It is a pride because it is a unique opportunity. This is the second edition and the fact that it is also international, to have had the opportunity to be with all of them and relive that moment in which we are just before competing, just like in Games, it’s a very nice ‘little time’ because we all truly understand what this means,” Perales noted.
The Aragonese woman assured that this Thursday they were “making history” and that it had to be “replicated in the rest of the world.” “And I hope that tomorrow it can be extrapolated to others because it is a movement that is very worthwhile because it opens the door to many people,” he remarked.
“That conventional athletes are included with athletes with some physical disability, I think it is very nice for everyone. I think that this initiative that has been had here or that has already been coming for several years serves so that many people take this as an example to to continue growing, not only here in Spain, but worldwide,” said Sotomayor.
IÑAKI PERALTA: “WE ARE BEFORE A MILESTONE IN THE HISTORY OF SPORTS”
Iñaki Peralta, president of the Sanitas Foundation, confessed that it was “a historic day for sport.” “We are, once again, facing a milestone in the history of sport. The Inclusive Games are part of a social movement that is turning inclusive sport into the sport of the future,” he said.
Furthermore, Iñaki Ereño, CEO of Bupa, recalled that “this is a dream that began many years ago” and that “what is happening today is nothing more than another season.” “The inclusive sports movement is a movement that has behind it a load of emotion and hope and vision on the part of a company and that basically wants to be bigger, therefore, this will continue and continue,” he indicated.
“I see it as a very beautiful moment because I see a lot of professional and non-professional athletes, but at a high level, but basically a season for something bigger that will still come, inclusive sport will be a global reality in a few years,” he stressed. .
For her part, the general director of the Sanitas Foundation, Yolanda Erburu, believes that “what has happened from 2010 to today has been an evolution of inclusive sport and the concept of the practice of inclusive sport at the federative and educational level, in the schools, and it has been a growing movement. What I foresee is a future in which sport will be inclusive or it will not be, basically what we are trying to do is for sport to be open to everyone,” he noted.
The Inclusive Games, which are part of the ‘Alliance for Inclusive Sports’, were born in 2019 and held their first edition in October 2021 after the Tokyo Games and with the subsequent postponement due to the coronavirus pandemic.
One of the keys is the work for many years of the Sanitas Foundation Chair of Inclusive Sports Studies led by Javier Pérez Tejero and which has managed, thanks to the application of academic research, to develop inclusive sports regulations to be able to develop a competition. that unites athletes with and without disabilities, Olympic and Paralympic.
