For four years, at least here in Argentina, few people – and the media – follow and are interested in the preparation and training conditions of that critical mass that in Such represents us with 177 athletes.
Neither in this medium nor in the majority do notes to gymnasts, rowers, amateur boxers, swimmers or cyclists come out. Is not that “does not sell”, is something much more fundamental, perhaps more serious: we are not too interested.
Something similar to what you wrote yesterday happens Rafael Spregelburd in its PROFILE column, after the death of the writer Tamara Kamenszain: “I would like poets and poets not to be news only when they die; that speaks very badly of the news and of those who write it ”.
In the sports arena, the Olympics work in a similar way to obituaries published as mandatory. We approach, see and vibrate with most of the Olympic disciplines in these two weeks that occur every four years. Then comes deliberate forgetting.
We get interested in some occasional sport, we watch it, we think as if we knew and we walk away
In some way or another we practice a sports extractivism: we become interested in an occasional sport, we think as if we knew, and we walk away. The same thing they do mining, oil and forestry with the resources of our planet: arrive, extract and leave. The problem is what happens next.
And what happens later, ultimately, is the consequence and explanation of what we see every four years. Did anyone know that a few months ago the National Judo Tournament? How many notes were written when de-financed the ENARD? Who is interested in Regattas on the Paraná or the Río de la Plata?
Soccer fascinates and mobilizes us. We like basketball, rugby and tennis. Every so often we enjoy a spring of boxing, hockey or volleyball. And that’s where we go.
That –cultural, media, idiosyncratic– It is transferred to companies that sponsor sports and athletes. That is why the state presence: to dampen this oblivion, to finance careers and projects, and also to generate a sports culture that transcends these 15 days, the temporary bubble in which many people feel they have the right to insult, deny and question kids who spend each of their days improving brands and preparing as best they can for events like Tokyo.
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