Caring for the athlete: the challenge for the upcoming year

Taking stock of the year is usually an interesting resource so that going from December 31 to January 1 is more than what it really is: a chronological curiosity that never implies a change other than in the almanac that our grandmothers hung on the wall of their kitchens.

Once the clarification has been made and assuming that everything important in sports is incomprehensible for a simple news article, 2022 can well be summarized as a season marked by fire by several of the most mediatic Olympic medalists in history.

Starting with Djokovic, bronze in Beijing and arrested and deported from Australia due to a confusing situation regarding his entry into the country as unvaccinated against COVID until Lionel Messi, gold medalist in the same 2008 games, becoming the most popular world football champion in history: there is no record of such fascination inside his country and outside of it because of the consecration of a single athlete in a clearly collective discipline.

In between, the retreats of Roger Federer and Serena Williams -those gaps that no one will fill- and Rafael Nadal’s 14th Roland Garros; the red dirt of Porte D” Auteuil is already missing him. A year full of longing for so much golden glory. And an extra curiosity: the five cases mentioned coincided in the Pekingese medal table.

Another valid option to explore the year that is ending, and continue to bring athletes to the forefront -forever, the real owners of the show- is to face 2023 with the challenge of honoring them off the courts so much how we worship them when they become the heroes of the stadiums.

From North to South and from East to West, 2022 left much to be desired when it comes to caring for our talents, not always innocent; always victims.

Just a couple of examples for us to focus on them beyond competencies.

While evaluating the possibility of reformulating the decouple between Russian sports and Olympism continue to accumulate sanctions for doping in the field of North American athletics. It would not be fair to compare what happened with the Russians in this regard. But it is not quite clear how much is systematic and how much is not in the North American case. Beyond everything, and how almost always, the only guilty one is the athlete who, while taking prohibited substances, seems to have neither doctors, nor managers, nor coaches, nor agents, nor financiers.

These issues and the increasingly numerous - in terms of volume and number of countries and disciplines involved - cases of abuse are enough to imagine the dimension of the challenge that lies on one side of the table.

On the other hand, all those cases that have been talked about profusely. Whether it’s the allegations of bribery in the election of the last two FIFA world championships, the various aggressions suffered by Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian climber punished for competing without using jihab, no one seems to be safe from being identified as the true guardian of the sporting, physical and mental health of our athletes.

Even among bitter enemies, limits are not set.

While Iran condemns Amir Nasr-Azadani, a professional soccer player, to the death penalty for having supported demonstrations in favor of women’s rights and each presentation of his country’s national team in Qatar invited him to thoroughly evaluate the reaction of each player during the performance of the anthem, a group of journalists from that country strafed the North American coach and captain to inappropriate and almost ridiculous questions at the press conference for the group stage match of the competition.

Perhaps the synthesis of the nonsense occurred in the Brittney Griner episode. A professional basketball player arrested for allegedly possessing substances banned by the Russian government ends up in prison for several months until her country’s government proposes to exchange her freedom for that of an arms dealer. Quite a figure of the absurdity of these times.

Regardless of what everyone thinks about each case, no leader of any Federation is encouraged to say enough in the only way that large corporations would understand the dimension of the conflict: that way is refusing to compete and before those where the conditions are not met.

The idea of a boycott is always unfortunate. Today, faced with certain episodes on both sides of the supposed sociopolitical conflict, it’s not too healthy to look the other way either.

That we can own up to it is my wish for this special day.

Happy New Year