The President of COP recalled that the naturalization of athletes is a “European trend”

José Manuel Constantino reminded on Tuesday that the naturalization of athletes is a “European trend” and not only happening in Portugal, noting that the Portuguese mission for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics included 19 athletes who were not born in the country.

“We are faced with a problem that we have already spoken about several times, in our Olympic mission there were 19 athletes who were not born in Portugal,” recalled the President of the Portuguese Olympic Committee (COP), referring to a delegation of 92 athletes who took part in the last Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.

José Manuel Constantino spoke after a controversy between Nelson Evora, Olympic triple jump champion in Beijing 2008, and Pedro Pichardo, gold winner in the same discipline in Tokyo 2020, in which the former said in an interview with Radio Observador that Pichardo was still bought . challenging the speed of his naturalization process, as opposed to his own.

In an interview with Lusa, the president of the Olympic body noted that of these 19 athletes, “some have started their sports training in Portugal, others have already started their sports training in other countries and completed it in Portugal, and still others have already completed their sports training.”

“Some have even competed in the Olympics for their countries of origin. And so this reality, which is a reality on a national scale, much smaller than what happens in most European countries, with the migration of many athletes to countries with stronger economies and more sustainable situations in terms of careers, is a European trend. Portugal is not an exceptional situation,” he stressed.

Without distinguishing between those who came to the country “on their own initiative” and those “who came because they were invited”, the CC President advocated the need to integrate “this dimension and this differentiation” into national representations.

“I should even say that the Pichardo case was not even one in which the naturalization process was faster. This is wrong. It’s not even like that. “, he recalled, delimiting the naturalization process “from an administrative point of view and from a political point of view” from the sporting aspect.

In addition to Pichardo (Cuba) and Evora (Ivory Coast), athletes Evelis Veiga, Oriol Dongmo and Lauren Basolo, handball players Alexis Borges, Daimaro Salina and Victor Iturrisa, rider Luciana Diniz, canoeist Antoine Lonay, gymnast Diogo Abreu, judoists Jorge Fonseca, Barbara Timo, Rochelle Nunez and Anri Egutidze, table tennis players Fu Yu and Shao Zeni, swimmer Tamila Holub and triathlete Melanie Santos.