Whenever we talk about Barcelona 92, the ceiling of the 22 Olympic medals, we talk about the ADO Plan, the magical open sesame of Spanish sport, which went from the catacombs and Olympic misery to the top. Scholarships and dignity for athletes, top-level facilities and technicians, cutting-edge preparation, and financing provided by the private company, which in return obtained free advertising on public television. 32 years have passed since then, and the last 12 the ADO Plan was no longer accompanied by the concept of magic but rather that of a model surpassed by social change.
The ADO has expired, they repeat from the Higher Sports Council (CSD), that in 2022, and thinking not only about Paris 2024, it launched Team España, a public aid program (51 million euros in the three years between Tokyo and Paris) that coexists temporarily with the scholarships of the old ADO Plan, mostly public now as well. “The main difference is that Team España is superelitist and only admits athletes who are going to fight for the Olympic medal. The program is much more than the scholarship. If they need rehabilitation support for the injury, psychological support, we cannot leave them out, or if they have problems reconciling work or family life,” explains Aitor Canibe, deputy general director of High Competition and responsible for the program together with Lola Boyé. , a high-performance technique, who remembers that Ana Peleteiro has been able to pay a nanny to take care of her daughter Lúa while she trained thanks to the funds from Team Spain, or that the athlete Adrián Ben has concentrated in South Africa with her help, or how Carolina Marín had two Indonesian players in Madrid to work as sparring in their training. “This is not just a scholarship and money. It is support for athletes in all their needs.”
After Tokyo 2021, with José Manuel Franco as president, the CSD set the goal of surpassing the 22 medals of Barcelona 92 in Paris. “We asked ourselves, what can we do?” says Canibe before telling how Team España was born. . “The Council of Ministers approved an allocation of about 48 million euros (extended to 51) for a special program whose objective was to bet on all those athletes who we believed could really fight for the medal or for an Olympic final in the Games. And that was the criteria to enter the program. The CSD subsidizes based on the projects presented by the federations that have athletes in Team España Elite.” Federations such as athletics, sailing or canoeing have received endowments of around one million euros each year.
The latest list managed by the directors of the plan, three months before the start of the Paris Games, includes 150 projects, including individual athletes, relay events, rowing boats, canoeing and sailing, and teams.
Those who have the most possibilities, according to the CSD analysis taking into account their status as finalists in Tokyo 2020 or their position among the top 10 in the world ranking of their sport, form a first level. There are 79 (48, men; 30, women, and one, mixed, the dressage team). In terms of sports, sailing dominates, with 10 sailors (six boats), followed by athletics (nine athletes), taekwondo (seven) and canoeing (four boats).
The remaining 71 fall into the category called Projection, with a lower financial endowment. “A projection athlete is an athlete who we understand can be in the final or who we understand is a very young athlete who is going to be very close to the final and who can be an experience for the next Olympic Games. As could have been the case with María Vicente if she had not broken us,” says Canibe. “And in fact María Vicente and Miguel Alvariño, who relatively recently also declared that he was possibly withdrawing from the Olympic race due to a mental health issue, are cases that in this commission we have treated in a very sensitive way because we understand that the commitment of the program is with sporting excellence, and they are athletes who have that excellence, but who must be taken care of because in María’s case she is a young athlete who normally can reach Los Angeles.”
“There are athletes who rise and fall from one level to another depending on their classification in the world ranking, unless they have been an Olympic finalist in the Tokyo Olympic Games,” explains Boyé. “We have kept these. For example, we have the case of Mireia Belmonte, where we do not know if she is going to be in the Games, but we understand that she is an athlete who must be especially cared for, although possibly she is in the Games. And for now, regardless of the outcome of her cycle, she and similar cases have been kept at the first level.” Rafa Nadal, 646 in the ranking, who doubts weekly about his ability to continue competing, and Pablo Carreño, a tennis player who is ranked 1,052 in the ATP, but was a finalist (top eight) in Tokyo, also remain in the first category .
Team España was financed for the first two years (33 million euros), with funds from the audiovisual rights of professional football (the Thebes quota, established in the Royal Decree on the sale of LaLiga television rights). The original project provided that from 2024, Team Spain’s funds, 18 million in the Olympic year, would come from the regular budget of the CSD, as another sign of its strategic nature as a long-term project, beyond the Paris event. , but the extension of the Government’s general budgets prevented it.
“The data tells us that we are working well and that we are moving in a good direction because the 2023 results in Olympic events have been above Barcelona’s 22 medals,” says Boyé. “But we even have to review which athletes are in the program, what results have been achieved, and perhaps we have to be more demanding.”
The new times, the social changes, ended up bringing to Spain the British model of Team GB which, financed by the public lottery, was the root of the success of the organizers at the London 2012 Games, where they obtained 65 medals and finished third in the medal table after the United States and China: they only supported sports with possibilities of success and, with even more economic effort, specialties with a large number of competitions and a small universal scope and number of practitioners, such as track cycling or canoeing.
And it does not stay there. The ambition is greater, beyond Paris. “Team Spain is much more. We want it to be a country project, the commitment to the next cycle to recover the feeling of belonging, of identity,” Canibe proclaims. “All the Spanish federations are Team España, all the agents, the ecosystem of Spanish sport, judges, coaches, all are Team España. We want to position a brand: the Higher Sports Council is Team España and Team España is the brand of Spanish sport.”
The total number of athletes on the Spanish team will be around 330 in Paris, similar to the 328 in Tokyo 2020 or the 309 in Rio 2016, of which 278 have already qualified.
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