In a country with 129 million inhabitants there must definitely be a dozen top-level boxers, lots of swimmers, cyclists, baseball players, car racers, tennis players; How many wins has Mexico missed? How many times could we have listened to our national anthem and seen the Mexican flag at the top, like at the Monaco Grand Prix after Sergio Pérez’s win?
Mexico is a country that has historically turned its back on athletes. Here you cannot survive if you want to dedicate yourself to sports and the most that those who want to excel in a discipline can do is combine practice with a low-paid part-time job that allows them to cover their expenses, even more so if it is a sport. expensive, just like motor racing, or else not popular in the country like football.
The Mexican government in charge of Andrés Manuel López Obrador reduced the scholarship for Mexican athletes by up to 65 percent after the Tokyo 2022 Olympic Games, a competition in which the country ranked 84th out of 204 countries, obtaining only four bronze medals. .
In Rio de Janeiro, the Mexican delegation obtained 5 medals but of them, three were silver and two bronze; while in London 2021 there were eight medals, one of them gold.
Enrique Peña Nieto invested nearly 6.4 billion pesos (345 million dollars) in sports at the beginning of his six-year term, but with budget cuts this amount fell to less than half in 2014.
In 2016 spending stagnated at two thousand 800 million pesos, that is, 150.6 million dollars, most of these resources are allocated to physical culture programs in public schools, the maintenance of sports venues, the organization of events and administrative tasks. In this way, in the end, the athletes still do not receive enough resources.
In 2022, the investment remained stagnant at about two thousand 380 million pesos, so the 4T, as in many other matters, was much shorter compared to its aspirations.
To identify the hole in which the sports culture in the country is found, it is not necessary to go very far, surely in the public sports center closest to your home, dear reader, you will find deficient and even dangerous facilities, old and patched without maintenance, in addition , there is no protocol to detect athletes with aptitudes, on the contrary, there have been very painful examples of athletes who have even had to ask for money on public transport to cover their expenses, as in the case of the Olympic medalist Misael Rodríguez.
Another evidence of the lack of promotion of sports activities is the prevalence of diseases such as diabetes, which in 2019 in Mexico had 12.8 million people with this disease and by 2045 the figure will increase to 22.9 million according to the National Autonomous University of Mexico. .
Given the government’s indifference, some companies and foundations have stood up, for example, Fundación Slim, businessman Carlos Bremer, BBA Bancomer, Tecate and Cerveza Corona.
As long as the strategy does not change, we will have to get used to a celebration from time to time, a medal here and another one there, but without a real sporting impulse that really allows the promotion of sport in the country.