Women’s achievements, dedication of figures and more than one embarrassment: The Santiago 2023 Pan American Games brought down the curtain on Sunday after 16 days of competition, in which almost 3,000 gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded. As expected, the United States, even without its top stars, topped the overall medal table: with 124 golds and 286 overall, almost twice as many as its immediate follower, Brazil.

The South American giant, who achieved his best result, with 66 golds, led a fierce battle with Mexico (52) and Canada (46) for second place. Although they surpassed the victories achieved in Lima 2019, the Canadians remained outside the final podium.

Richard Carapaz is raising the name of Ecuador: he drank the traditional drink mote con huesillos and joked with the Chileans during cycling training at the Pan American Games in Santiago 2023.

Cuba (30 gold) had a slightly lower rating than the one achieved four years ago, but it closed top-5, above Colombia (29) which surpassed the first 27 places in the capital of Peru. Chile (eighth, twelve golds), host of the tournament beset by problems with logistics and organization, also narrowly missed the Lima record, but its athletes surprised in more than one event. Argentina (seventh) was far from Lima’s huge record (33 gold medals), but in line with previous competitions with 17 gold medals.

female seal

Most of the main figures, whose faces adorned Santiago-2023 posters, shone before the eyes of the Andes mountain range. Women – 48.4% of almost 6,500 athletes – played a special role.

Canadian swimmer Maggie Mac Neil, the 23-year-old Olympic winner in Tokyo 2020, has established herself as the most successful athlete with five gold medals, in addition to silver and bronze.

Silver for Ecuador! Richard Carapaz wins a time trial medal at the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago

Idalys Ortiz, a 34-year-old Cuban judo legend, won her fourth consecutive gold medal in the plus 78-kilogram category and in the mixed team category, while Colombian Mariana Pajón (32), the queen of BMX, became a three-time champion. Dominican Marileidy Paulino, world champion (27), flew on the athletic tracks of the National Stadium where she won gold in the 200 meters and 4×400 meters in the mixed relay, silver in the 4×400 and bronze in the 4×100 meters in the women’s relay.

Las Leonas, Argentine national team hockey on grass, they walked the field in Santiago and won their eighth title in ten Pan American finals. Mexican Paola Longoria (34) marked a milestone: she won her eleventh gold in the racket and became the Latin American athlete with the most gold medals in the history of the Pan American Games.

Two pieces

Cuban double Olympic champion Julio César La Cruz (34) became the first boxer with four Pan American gold medals, and Brazilian swimmer Guilherme Costa (25) won first place in the four disciplines in which he competed.

Other difficult names stumbled or split the waters in cold Santiago, where it is skatehe breaking upclimbing and e-sports For the first time, they were well received in Pan-American society.

Richard Carapaz: ‘Thirst for revenge’ for a ‘bittersweet debut at the Pan American Games’? The international press is focused on the Ecuadorian cyclist

Colombia’s Anthony Zambrano, the Olympic and world runner-up, finished third in the 400m final but was left empty-handed after being disqualified for running into the second lane. Venezuelan fencer Rubén Limardo, Olympic winner in London 2012, was left off the podium in individual and team fencing.

Carapaz, among the frustrations

The Cuban team, winner of twelve out of 19 baseball tournaments, failed again: it was eliminated in the group stage for the second time in a row. And Ecuadorian cyclist Richard Carapaz, winner of the road gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, placed seventh in the special race in which he started as the favorite. A fall knocked him out of contention when he appeared to be pedaling towards a gold medal.

However Locomotive Carchi He recovered from the accident to get back on his motorcycle and play an effective and complicated company role for the benefit of his partner Jhonatan Narváez, who took advantage of the key performance of Carapaz. The 2019 Giro d’Italia champion also executed a strategy that destroyed five competitors, with Narváez using teamwork to win the gold medal.

Carapaz did not reach the podium on the Pan-American route, although he took silver in the individual time trial, which is not his specialty. The Ecuadorian cyclist was one of the biggest attractions of the Games due to his status as a world star, but he left Santiago without a championship title.

Sad and funny

The mistakes of some athletes seemed to be overlooked because of mistakes in the organization or implementation of the Pan American Games. The worst, without equal: bad measurement that cut off about 4 kilometers from the route of the 20-kilometer march, won by Kimberly García, 30 years old.

The Peruvian and other competitors “broke” the men’s and women’s world records, but the huge times were canceled when the organization noticed a mistake. The CEO of Santiago 2023, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, considers what happened to be “nonsense” and assures that the person responsible for carrying out the measurements, an expert from the Pan American Athletics Federation, has apologized and taken the blame for the fiasco. But that was not the only unusual situation.

Before the start of the duel, on October 20, the Chileans prepared a banquet of humor because the keys to the doors of the apartments in the Olympic Village were not individualized.

With a time limit, volunteers had to try more than 1,300 keys to secure entry to each apartment, according to local media.

Water was also leaking in the city, the Olympic swimming pool had a drop in level due to a broken matrix, and there were very few bathrooms in the press center for the dozens of journalists from all over the continent who worked in the place every day. . (D)