National Indigenous Games and urgent vaccination for athletes: the challenges of Renzo Manyari, new and very young president of the Peruvian Olympic Committee

Peru’s delegation to the First Pan American Junior Games in Cali has not yet been vaccinated.

And that problem, only three months away from its inauguration, is the first to be faced by the new president of the Peruvian Olympic Committee, lawyer Renzo Manyari, when he returns to Lima from Qatar this Wednesday.

Manyari was elected last Friday by an overwhelming majority as the 27th president in the history of the COP and the following day he left for Qatar for the historic Congress of the International Weightlifting Federation in his capacity as part of the national federation of that sport.

Manyari, 30 years old, obtained 22 votes in favor in a ballot that registered one blank vote and one null, so he will lead the entity in the period 2021-2025 replacing Pedro Del Rosario (2017-21).

In this way, the new head of the COP becomes the youngest Olympic leader in the Americas, and possibly among the youngest heads of any National Olympic Committee in the world.

Before leaving Doha, he spoke to Around The Rings via Whatsapp, about the most pressing challenges he must face in a post-covid world.

“Post-covid? Still in Peru comes the third wave.... I think it is the most complicated time to take over an Olympic Committee, economic recession, a very strong distancing. Until a year ago it was illegal to train,” he says.

“That the community understands that sport is the tool needed to partially alleviate the pandemic issue is very complicated”. And after this assertion he reveals his main concern that accompanied him throughout the long day of discussions on the IWF constitutional reform.

“I have found that almost no one in the delegation to the Junior Pan American Games is vaccinated, and it is a mandatory requirement to participate,” he recalls.

The official assures that the first thing he will do when he returns to Lima is to promote the immunization of “Team Peru”.

“Otherwise we will not be able to compete,” he warned.

Manyari did not rule out, as one of the options, contacting Panam Sports to explore the possibilities of accessing its immunization plan in Miami.

The new president of the COP revealed that the president of the continental organization, Chilean Neven Ilic, was one of the first people to congratulate him.

Peru has a hundred athletes qualified for these First Junior Games that will begin in the Colombian city of Cali on November 25.

“Everything has to be tried. History will judge us if we made enough efforts to be able to participate or we simply rested on our laurels.”

A new Olympic government has coincided with a new government in Peru headed by leftist Pedro Castillo.

Manyari told ATR that he plans to ask to be received by the governor in the next few days to present his project to create the First National Indigenous Games.

“Part of the policies of this government is precisely to strengthen the cultures of the interior of the country, and that means knowing how to identify the sports activities of these communities”, said the president of the COP.

Through this order, he hopes to implement projects, some of them with the help of Olympic Solidarity. Among them, one designed to detect the genetic and morphological predisposition to certain sports in specific regions.

The impulse of these investigations, he assures, besides generating literature and therefore the export of “Peru brand” knowledge, will allow the creation of a new system of competitions that highlights identity, gender and communal heroes or idols, and emphasizes the autochthonous and the national in line with the new government.

“On that side, I believe that we have coincidences and it will be necessary to strengthen and maintain them in time for the administrations that come after mine,” he said.

Manyari told ATR that he will also fight for a new National Sports Law.

Another objective in his perspective will be the Legacy of the Pan American Games of Lima 2019 and the need that as a State policy it serves to create a Regional Center for training and qualification.

At the same time, he will seek to ensure that international events are guaranteed in the world-class structure built, especially in disciplines that enhance great results for Peru.

The Peruvian traditional and digital media praised the election of the young lawyer, who was described as a “strategic planner, responsible, efficient and collaborative”.

In his favor he also seemed to count, as a weightlifting federation member, with the good qualification in the organization of tournaments such as the Grand Prix in 2019 and the (virtual) World Youth Championships in 2020.

To his management is also added a progression of international results of Peruvian weightlifters in different categories.

Manyari entered the Peruvian Olympic world as a scholarship holder univesitario martial arts athlete. Graduated as a lawyer he assumed the general secretariat of the Peruvian Federation of Kung Fu /Wushu, and then served as legal advisor to the COP. In 2017 he was elected president of the weightlifting federation.

His specialization in sports law allowed him to advise more than 40 national sports federations, an element that also seemed to influence the outcome of an election attended by historic Olympic official Iván Dibós, honorary IOC member

Manyari says that a change in the COP, not only in its administrative and operational structure, but in the need to concretize the current policies recommended by the IOC, led him to run.

Reconciliation, consensus, digitalization and economic self-sufficiency, will be flags in his mandate, he says.

“I am convinced that I won the election not by offering something, some favoritism, some perk. It was a vote born of full confidence,” said the new Olympic leader.