Inês Henriques, world champion of the 50 km walk in London 2017, and winner of the European Championship in Munich 2018, will say goodbye to high-level athletics next Sunday. She closes her competitive chapter in the São Sebastião parish tournament in Rio de Janeiro, where she competed for the first time, at age 12, in a competition named after Jorge Miguel, her former coach.
For TSF, Inês Henriques took stock of a career full of achievements, revealing that she was proud of everything achieved: “It was a long career, which had ups and downs, and I managed to become world champion at the age of 37. I myself did not expect it “But the 50 km gave me that opportunity. I overcame some difficulties and in 2017 and 2018 I reached the peak of my career.”
Regarding the state of athletics, the 43-year-old athlete highlights the lack of training and support for sport and the need to attract young athletes naturally and not through tests that, she guarantees, not even she herself “passed.”
“Athletics is not going very well, we have had some medals, but from naturalized athletes. All countries do this, it is a fact. There are some countries that invest in training and we have neglected that a bit. If we do not have training and we will not seek athletes in schools, we will not have athletes in the future. The theorists say that they have to be stipulated talents, if I had to take one of these talent tests I probably would not pass and I don’t see myself as a world champion,” she confesses.
With more than 30 years of career, Inês Henriques speaks of enormous pride in the achievements achieved and reveals that winning the Olympic Games in the walking discipline only did not happen because, she believes, they did not let her go.
“I missed the opportunity to win the 50 km at the Olympic Games. We did everything that depended on us, what depended on the forces that the world sports organizations did not allow us to do. They wanted to show that they were the ones in charge and not us” . There is a lot of support. When I talk about female equality I usually say equal opportunities. I wanted to have the same opportunities as my classmates, which I didn’t have, and no one joined the marchers’ movement to fight for equality, which should be a right and something we shouldn’t demand,” she laments.
A 50 km world championship, a European championship, three participations in the Olympic Games and four participations in the Top 10 of the World Championships leave Inês Henriques in the history of national athletics.
Source: TSF
