“In 20 years there will be more black players. I hope they don’t go through the same thing as us” | LALIGA VS

“Sometimes I have thought: ‘What am I doing here, if I am the only black girl?’” The center Lola Pendande (El Ejido, Almería, 2000) asked herself that question many times throughout her life. She grew up “surrounded by white people”, so she found her first role models among her family, who settled in Spain after leaving Guinea-Bissau. Especially her mother, who gave her a life that she could not have, and her brothers, who played soccer and encouraged her to play sports. She tried athletics and stood out as a sprinter until at the age of 12 one of her cousins ​​invited her to a basketball training session with CD Roquetas, the local team she played for. Pendande fell in love with this sport and turned it into a vehicle for her integration.

The Almería native is today one of the future faces of the Spanish women’s team and a role model for the new generations of girls. Something she missed in her early days. “I didn’t realise until I grew up. As girls, we need to see people of our skin colour in positions of power so that our dreams are not cut short,” she tells former player Cindy Lima (Barcelona, ​​1981) in the eleventh LALIGA VS video podcast.

Lima was a pivot like Pendande. She played more than 120 matches as an international with the Spanish women’s team between 2007 and 2013. With an Angolan father and a Cuban mother, this Catalan believes in the power of sport to help find those much-needed role models and contribute to integration. “I feel very identified with you and very reflected in you,” she tells Pendande. Also to end hatred. The former player is an ambassador for the SCORE project, a consortium formed by 13 institutions from six countries of the European Union led by the Spanish Observatory of Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE), an organization that depends on the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration and with which LALIGA has collaborated. “Sport makes you humanize a person and see them with the same values ​​and dreams as you. Anything that happens has a huge echo.”

Lima believes that these types of initiatives are essential to eradicate racism on and off the pitch. For this reason, she looks to the future with “a lot of optimism”. A feeling that Pendande agrees with. “Sport has always been something that unites people. It will help future athletes a lot, those of us who are a minority, since we have everyone involved: fans, managers, leading athletes like Vinícius, Iñaki Williams…”, she says. And she dreams that the new generations of girls will experience a different scenario than the one she experienced. “In 20 years there will be more black players. I hope they don’t go through the same thing as us.”