The wake of the deceased Guayaquil sport

And when I think that in the old days Guayaquil was the gateway to modern sports in Ecuador. And not only did he introduce the practice of all sports, but he taught them to young people throughout the country and was a model of a sports organization. Our greatest leader -Manuel Seminario Sáenz de Tejada- was the promoter of the establishment of provincial federations in Ecuador, created the National Sports Federation of Ecuador, acquired the first international members, including FIFA, and achieved that, almost a century ago, Ecuador participated with three athletes at the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924. And even more: he was the first leader in an international position, since FIFA appointed him as an advisor in 1927.

All this is the initial part of a rich history, a matter that is of no interest to today’s neophyte journalism, which boasts that it has not read a single book, except the one on tactics and strategy that is useful for giving football lessons to technical directors. disqualify those who know the most. “Dušan Drašković and Álex Aguinaga cannot declare their choice because they are out of date”, sang in a chorus of impudent and impudent people who grab microphones and screens every day.

Guayaquil was the engine of all sports, so even the biggest regionalist and hater of our city’s sports glory will recognize this in his solitary reflections. In all the official international victories of our country, from 1937 to 1996, athletes from Guayaquil appeared, with the exception of the triumph of Luis Calderón Gallardo, from Quito, at the Bolivarian Games in 1938; and Carola Castro from Esmeralda, at the South American Athletics Championships in Lima, 1939.

There is no history of the sport of Guayaquil or a subject interested in it, but no one can dispute the contribution of our great sporting values, such as the four musketeers of Guayas (Carlos Luis and Abel Gilbert Vásconez, Luis Alcívar Elizalde and Ricardo Planas Villegas), who is the name Ecuador was printed in all the world’s newspapers, in all languages, when they won the South American swimming title in Lima in 1938, and only four competed against complete teams from countries with Olympic experience.

Or the famous name of Pancho Segura Cano, Bolivarian and South American champion and later monarch of the United States and three-time world champion in professional tennis. Today, the unforgettable Segura Cano is the only Ecuadorian athlete to appear in the Hall of Fame of a sport, which means that he is considered a universal legend.

Behind Segura are Luis Alcívar Elizalde, the first national athlete who achieved a South American record in 1939; César Salazar Navas and Publio Rodríguez, boxing champions of Latin America; Abel Gilbert, who repeated his South American title in 1939 in Montevideo; Miguel Olvera, Eduardo Zuleta and Pancho Guzmán, winning the South American championship and eliminating the United States in the 1967 Davis Cup; Jacinta Sandiford, the first Pan American medalist in 1951, twice won the Jorge Delgado Panchana Award, the holder of at least twenty South American gold medals and the honor of being the first Ecuadorian Olympic finalist. And Andrés Gómez Santos, collector of crowns in ATP tennis competitions and winner of the legendary Roland Garros tournament in 1990 in singles (in doubles he was crowned at the French Open and also at the US Open).

I could fill this column and ten more commenting on all that Guayaquil has made available to Ecuador in terms of glory and sporting greatness. What Manuel Seminario sowed was a magnificent seed from which great leaders emerged: Manuel Díaz Granados, Armando Pareja Coronel, Augusto Jijón Terán, Pío López Lara, Jaime Nebot Velasco, Rafael Guerrero Valenzuela, Harry Cartwright Chiriboga, Voltaire Paladines Polo, Juvenal Sáenz Gil, Alberto Vallarino Benítez, Augusto Barreiro Solórzano, Sabino Hernández Martínez and César Muñoz Vicuña. They were the ones who built sports greatness, now non-existent.

The newspaper EL UNIVERSO commented harshly on the sad reality of football in Buenos Aires. What used to be a building symbol of power is now a moth-eaten and demolished hut. But this gloomy panorama does not only reflect on football; This is what we see in all sports in Guayas. The only work that is noticeable is the repair, reconstruction and painting of certain stages, but sport does not appear anywhere.

For more than a decade, there have been no first-class provincial championships in basketball, baseball, football, swimming, wrestling, weightlifting, athletics, boxing, cycling. Repaired or repainted stages are planned for hosting pop artists or preachers who will save the planet from extinction. It won’t save the sport because it no longer exists. The Sports Federation of Guayas receives about ten million dollars a year, between government allocations and ‘self-management’, as they are called rents, especially for the Modelo Alberto Spencer Stadium and the Colosseum Voltaire Paladines Polo. It is strange that the administration is carried out by a private fake company, which we are investigating.

When I started following football and reading newspapers, I knew that the national teams of that sport were based on football players from Guayaquil, or those from Milagro (Guido Andrade, Honorato Gonzabay, Hugo Pardo, Flavio Nall, Julio Caisaguano, Hamilton Cuvi), or Santa Elena (Marcos and Alberto Spencer) who played in Guayaquil. Barcelona and Emelec are like those impoverished aristocrats who walk around talking about old greatness and showing worn-out titles of nobility. It all started when rookie leagues and intercollegiate leagues disappeared.

Fedeguayas stopped holding its championship in the demolished Ramón Unamuno Stadium and clubs like Uruguay, Huracán, 10 de Agosto, Manta and Caribe, from where great players came to first-class teams, disappeared. Teams such as Everest, Patria, Español, Panamá, Nortemérica, Aduana, Liga Deportiva Universitaria de Guayaquil have also disappeared, or have gotten used to being small. Cantonal leagues exist like unburied corpses; Milagro is an example. Unión Deportiva Valdez and Milagro Sporting, which today has a modern stadium but no football players, originated from that wasteful city.

A few years ago in Guayaquil you could choose which stadium or coliseum to go to watch sports from Monday to Sunday. Football, athletics and cycling in Model, today the Alberto Spencer Stadium; basketball, boxing amateur and fights in Huancavilca Coliseum; baseball at Yeyo Úraga, professional boxing, basketball, volleyball and more at Voltaire Paladines Polo Coliseum; swimming and diving in the Olympic and Alberto Vallarino pools.

Today, Fedeguayas is just a propaganda emporium, nothing free, to which a journalism that prides itself on having only watched football for a few years and despises any other branch of sport adheres en masse. (OR)