Jose Manuel Constantino, a sports thinker who inspired generations of athletes, has died. He fought illness without ever giving up.

José Manuel Constantino, who died on Sunday aged 74, showed his thought and fighting spirit as President of the Portuguese Olympic Committee (COP), inspiring generations of athletes to strengthen the country’s sporting level.

An inspiration to all who were with him, with a deep sense of mission (he was “waiting” for the end of the most successful Olympic participation in history to “retire”) and an undeniable intellectual talent, he fought the disease, never giving up, refusing to stop even in the most difficult moments (and there were many).

During subsequent hospitalizations, he always remained alert and active, defending sport, his great passion.

Elected as Vicente Moura’s successor in March 2013, he was then 62 years old, the former head of the Portuguese Institute of Sport, which preceded the Portuguese Institute of Sport and Youth (IPDJ), and the Portuguese Sports Confederation (CDP) was about to cease to exist. His third and final term in the organisation, during which he achieved the peak of four decades as a leader and witnessed the best national missions at the Games.

Constantino, the first physical education graduate (1975) to head the COP, was one of the country’s greatest sports thinkers, even editing books and articles on the subject, interspersed with experience in basic and university teaching, as well as in management positions.

His first national project came in 2000, when he took over as President of the CDP after a period as Advisor to the Portuguese Weightlifting Federation (1986-1990), which preceded his debut as Technical Secretary of Algés e Dafundo (1985).

The transition to the leadership of IDP two years later marked the steady rise of a career that has taken him through public administration and municipal spheres on his way to a key mission: managing the destiny of the highest entity in Portuguese sport.

Concerned about the social valuation of this sector as a national goal and the strengthening of the organizational capacity of the federations, Constantino turned the CS into a point of balance between successive governments and the sports movement with a gradual increase in competitiveness, while maintaining a disarming frankness in these institutional relationships.

By showing sensitivity in his human approach, he laid the foundations for the emancipation of a new batch of athletes with whom he established close relationships, as was evident at the reception of the national Mission to Paris 2024 at the Palais de Belem on July 8.

Some of them wanted to take a photo with him, and they were asked even more than the President of the Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa himself at the time when he was fighting the disease that killed him, but they never gave up in the face of several moments of adversity.

Despite successive hospitalizations, he remained attentive and involved in defending his lifelong passion, with which he tried to “settle” the score with the past and even the future in the last months before the CS, asking for more financial support and attention for the sector, amid criticism of the lack of sports culture from the government and civil society.

As he argued when he received his Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Lisbon, sport faces a “future of great complexity”, highlighting issues such as demographics and the “lack of data, information and updated research”.

“The problems of motor and sports literacy expressed in the national situation reveal the need to build a conceptual matrix of sport in Portugal. [que possa ser] “is understood as a public good whose enormous benefits extend far beyond the individual who practices it,” he said then, in November 2023.

Born in Santarém on 21 May 1950, José Manuel Constantino has fulfilled his lifelong dream, coinciding with the best years of Portuguese Olympic sport, winning nine medals after Rio 2016, the first of three Games held during the COP presidency.

The unprecedented four podiums achieved at Tokyo 2020 (in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic) will be repeated at Paris 2024, but with more important “colours” for the most lucrative of the 26 national participants in the world’s premier multi-sport event, hours before the death of one of its renowned thinkers.