Fifty towns converge on Santa Rosa on Saturday as La Pampa launches the second module of the 2026 provincial sports finals.
The program brings together roughly five hundred young athletes aged eleven to sixteen for a weekend of multi-sport competition. The events span six different disciplines across various municipal venues.
Subsecretary of Sports Ceferino Almudévar outlined the schedule during a press conference alongside Director of Federated Sports Gustavo Moreno.
“It is a program with which we have been working since February with all the technicians of the Undersecretariat of Sports, but at the same time it is a program of Olympic La Pampa with which we have been working for four years,” Almudévar told RADIO DON.
The overhauled provincial games merge traditional base sports with individual disciplines from the Olympic La Pampa initiative.
“What we did was fuse base sports and we mixed them with the individual sports of Olympic La Pampa to incorporate 24 disciplines, that allow us to reach the most remote places of the province, the most distant ones, and that everyone has the possibility of participating in the provincial final,” Almudévar told RADIO DON.
The current block features basketball, football, swimming, padel, archery, and modern pentathlon. Competition began last weekend with an initial slate that included badminton, beach volleyball, hockey, handball, table tennis, taekwondo, softball, and boxing.
Organizers manage the multi-sport calendar through a general medal standings table designed to highlight smaller municipalities. The provincial government handles operations through the Undersecretariat of Sports under the Ministry of Social Development and Human Rights.
Athletes from eighty regional localities took part in preliminary qualification rounds leading up to this weekend. Competition kicks off Saturday morning across six designated sporting facilities in Santa Rosa.
Basketball games take place at Polideportivo Butaló, while football matches run at Club Mac Allister. Swimming events occupy the Club All Boys pool, padel unfolds at Complejo Cristian, archery is hosted at Colegio Manuel Belgrano on Avenida Belgrano Norte 96, and modern pentathlon runs at Médanos Verdes on León Nicanoff 890.
Participating towns span the province from 25 de Mayo and General Pico to smaller settlements like Carro Quemado, Chacharramendi, and Casa de Piedra. Competitors also arrive from General Acha, Eduardo Castex, Victorica, Guatraché, and Toay among roughly forty represented communities this weekend.
“We are talking about a ceiling of 2,800 athletes and that gratifies us because they are athletes who come from all places in the province,” Almudévar told RADIO DON.
The subsecretary said that standout competitors earn projections toward major regional events including the Araucanía Games, Epade, and the Patagonian Integration Games. Officials also look toward a future return to the National Evita Games once scheduling permits.
“It is a foundational program, unprecedented, and we can also qualify it as a pilot test, with the objective of reinforcing it next year and being able to reach even more of the geography,” Almudévar told RADIO DON.
