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Benfica announced on Tuesday that its senior men’s and women’s athletics teams “will not be present at the National Indoor Championships.” In a statement, the club maintains that “health should be the first and highest priority for all actors and those involved in an organization of this dimension.”
Fully disclosed:
Sport Lisboa e Benfica informs that the male and female senior athletics teams will not be present at the National Indoor Championships. This is because health must come first and be the highest priority for all stakeholders and those involved in an organization of this dimension.
We congratulate ourselves on the historic journey last weekend, with three gold medals won for Portugal in the European Indoor Athletics Championships, one of them from Pedro Pablo Pichardo, an athlete in whom the Club believes, who has supported and entrenched for nearly four years. It is to congratulate the European champion in the triple jump, as well as the other two Portuguese gold medals, Patrícia Mamona and Auriol Dongmo, to congratulate with all merit.
But living athletics, promoting the sport and keeping the ambition to win unassailable is not just about entering a track and doing your best. At a time when Portugal is still under the contingencies of a confinement that everyone must respect and, at the same time, contribute with good practices that minimize possible infections and new uncontrolled pandemics, several contact attempts, and in various ways, were carried out by the Club in recent weeks, in the sense of realizing with the Portuguese Athletics Federation that security measures would be applied in this important competition.
The answers to the concerns – of all of them, we want to believe, because it is the credibility of the modality and the sports truth that is also at stake – were scarce and completely inconclusive, which led the management of SL Benfica to make this decision:
– We still do not know what sanitary measures will exist for everyone involved; Will there be tests, for example?
– it is not clear in what form the competition will take place; yesterday, under pressure from the Pombal City Council, it was decided to divide the race into two lanes and not put all the pressure on the population of Pombal.
Also, the date for this National Championship is completely out of place, right after a European Championship, and will not have had due reflection on the part of the FPA.
No one is immune from this pandemic, but SL Benfica has been doing its best to do its part, regularly testing athletes and teams in different modalities. This is the approach, through the Human Performance Department (HPD), in coordination with the standards of the General Health Directorate, since March 2020.
With the utmost ambition, Benfica would like to get back on track. But the risk cannot justify the socio-sporting objectives. In other countries national tests have been carried out, but always with tests, as, indeed, happened in this European indoor track, in Torun (Poland), which was established by Pichardo, Mamona and Dongmo.
In sports competitions -and a National Championship should be a good example-, SL Benfica’s management, in line with the opinion of the Club’s HPD, understands that best practices must be followed, because what is at stake is health public.
Unfortunately, it does not seem realistic to believe that effective and rigorous health standards are created and enforced in time for all competitors, just days away from the defined date.
March 9, 2021,
The Management of Sport Lisboa e Benfica
