Marco Alves will be the head of the Portuguese mission for Paris 2024, the president of the Portuguese Olympic Committee (COP) confirmed to Lusa, showing optimism about the national prospects in the next Olympic Games.
“The head of mission is Marco. That is already decided. The Executive Committee, right at the beginning of his term, defined that it be Marco Alves, who was already the chief of mission of the Tokyo Games.[2020]”, revealed.
For José Manuel Constantino, “there is no one within the COP who knows better what a mission is than Marco Alves.”
“We have very qualified people, but Marco is the one who, before the COP Executive Committee, gives guarantees that he can rise to this challenge, as he did at the Tokyo Games,” he stressed.
In an interview with the Lusa agency, 422 days before the start of Paris 2024, the president of the COP stated that the Olympic preparation “is going relatively well.”
“We don’t have issues that could cause us great apprehensions, either from the organizational point of view or from the point of view of building the Olympic mission. To change this tranquility, if I can call it that, so that we can meet our objectives, both from from the point of view of organizing a good mission, as well as from the point of view of sporting objectives”, he added.
With four athletes already classified -swimmers Diogo Ribeiro, Miguel Nascimento and Camila Rebelo and surfer Teresa Bonvalot-, Constantino indicated that the number of classifications is within the expectations of the COP.
“Even, in terms of swimming, exceeding what were our best expectations. But qualifications are ongoing. We will wait to see if, in fact, that first objective, of having a delegation [maior], either from the point of view of gender balance or from the quantitative point of view, it can correspond to what is our objective. And then there are the competitive targets,” he noted.
The Olympic leader continues to aim for a greater number of sports represented and the same number of medals won in Tokyo 2020 -four-, because repeating what the Portuguese mission did at the Games held in 2021 in the Japanese capital “is already an exceptional situation”. . .
“A sports organization that achieves what it achieved in Tokyo would be incomprehensible for it to lower its objectives regarding a new edition of the Games. And that’s why we’re working [e] when I say that we are there, there is the Olympic Committee, there are the federations, there are the coaches, there are the athletes, in the sense that this objective can be achieved. It is a difficult objective, it is an objective that is not easy to achieve, but I believe that our athletes have a sporting value so that it is placed on the horizon in which we place it ”, he maintained.
Constantine defended that he cannot “transmit any other feeling than optimism” to the athletes, especially because “they would not understand” that “the president of the Olympic Committee was not the first to believe that this is possible.”
“Naturally, I am hopeful that the goals we have set ourselves can be achieved,” he concluded.
Source: TSF
