The delegation of athletes that as of this Friday represents us at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games embodies the positive inspiration that Puerto Rico needs in these times of great challenges
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A total of 51 Puerto Rican athletes will carry the Puerto Rican flag in France, with a firm commitment to display the best of their abilities to make the millions of Puerto Ricans who will be following these Olympics proud.
Our athletes are the example of fighting with tenacity to master the greatest challenges, and they are the mirror in which every Puerto Rican should look at themselves to also overcome the hurdles of everyday obstacles in family, work and community spaces.
Puerto Rico arrives at these Games on a historic streak. For the first time, the island has reached the podium in three consecutive Olympics. In 2012, Jaime Espinal and Javier Culson won silver in wrestling and bronze in 400-meter hurdles, respectively. In Rio 2016, La Borinqueña sounded for the first time thanks to tennis player Mónica Puig, a feat that would later be repeated by hurdler Jasmine Camacho-Quinn at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
Puerto Rico’s recent success in the Olympics is evidence that the island can produce athletes who will battle with the best in the world, either through their development on the island, or by recruiting U.S.-born athletes of Puerto Rican descent who identify with the Puerto Rican cause.
Camacho-Quinn, one of the delegation’s standard bearers, is once again one of the leading figures of our delegation, with the historic opportunity to become the first Puerto Rican athlete to win two Olympic medals. Born and raised in the United States to a Puerto Rican mother, she is the example of a Boricua who learned to love and appreciate our country from afar. Like her, there are many other Puerto Ricans who have allowed their Puerto Ricanness to emerge despite the distance from our land. The same can be said of the delegation’s male flag bearer, wrestler Sebastian Rivera, born in New Jersey but who will go to his first Olympic Games representing the island. Rivera, world runner-up in his category, is also a serious medal contender.
Before 2012, Puerto Rico had gone 16 years without reaching the Olympic podium since Daniel Santos’ bronze medal in Atlanta 1996. In total, the island has won 10 medals since it made its Olympic Games debut in London 1948.
Special attention will also be given to the men’s national basketball team, which will return to the Olympic stage for the first time in 20 years. This team raised the passion for basketball among the Puerto Rican public, who lived with emotion the Olympic Playoffs held on the island in the first week of July, where the dreamed qualification to Paris was achieved. This opened the door that, for the first time, Puerto Rico will go to the Olympics with its two basketball teams, men’s and women’s, a milestone that serves as a testimony to the good moment this sport is going through on the island.
The arrival of the Olympic Games should also serve to reaffirm the importance of sport in our society. And that importance should not only be reflected in the prominence that sport will gain here in the coming weeks, but should be matched by consistent support from government entities and private enterprise for our athletes, federations and the Puerto Rico Olympic Committee.
The only way Puerto Rico can continue to develop world-class athletes is if all the parties involved, from youth coaches to high-performance sports, are in tune with each other, and if the support -both financial and logistical- is coordinated and planned.
We hope that these Olympics will help the various sectors of sport to take advantage of the attention they will be receiving to all of them and to explain what their greatest needs are, and to work together to find solutions that will guarantee continued success and well-being for our athletes.
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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.
