The year following the holding of the Olympic Games usually allows for some relaxation for athletes who choose to recover their energies towards the next cycle. This, however, will not be the case in 2022.
With the postponement from Tokyo-2020 to 2021, caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the calendar before the Paris-2024 Olympics has become shorter. This time, the post-Games “hangover” year will be replaced by a year full of World Championships and the qualifying process for the French edition has already started.
“I am curious to see how we are going to deal with this shorter period for the Games”, said the sports director of the COB (Olympic Committee of Brazil), Jorge Bichara.
In addition to the atypical three-year preparation cycle, he expresses concern about the impact that the pandemic continues to have on the international sporting scene, now under the threat of the omicron variant.
“But we continue with the same objectives: to work closely with confederations, clubs, accompany our main athletes, maintain the performance of the modalities in which we win medals and expand the number of medalist modalities”, completes the director.
The water sports, which gave Brazil three medals in Tokyo, will return to Japan for the Fukuoka World Cup, starting on May 13th.
The event will start just five months after the World Championship in short pool (25 meters), held this December, in Abu Dhabi. In it, the country won a gold medal with Nicholas Santos in the 50 m butterfly —non-Olympic distance— and two bronze, in the 4 x 200 m freestyle relay and in the 50 m breaststroke —also outside the Olympic program—, with João Gomes Júnior .
Bruno Fratus, bronze medalist in Tokyo in the 50 m freestyle, will have his next big test in Fukuoka. Ana Marcela Cunha, gold in the aquatic marathon and who still won the fifth championship on the world circuit at the end of this year, will seek in the competition the only major achievement she still lacks, in the 10 km race (the same disputed in the Games).
Starting on July 15th, it will be the turn of the World Athletics Championship, in Eugene, USA. Alison dos Santos and Thiago Braz, bronze medalists in Tokyo, respectively in the 400 m hurdles and pole vault, will once again fight to remain among the best in the world.
The Judo World Championship, in Tashkent (Uzbekistan), will be held from August 7, with the weight of the first major test of the new coaching staff of the national team. The women’s team now has Sarah Menezes as its head coach, the first Brazilian Olympic champion in judo, in 2012. The men are now led by Kiko Pereira, trainer of Mayra Aguiar and Daniel Cargnin, both medalists in the last Olympics.
Volleyball will also have its World Cups next year. The male one, in Russia, starting on August 26th, and the female one, in Holland and Poland, starting on the 23rd of September. In basketball, only the women’s tournament will take place in 2022, in Australia, starting on September 22 — the Brazilian team will still compete in a qualifying tournament in February.
The World of Artistic Gymnastics will take place in Liverpool, in October, with no confirmed date yet. Rebeca Andrade, who after winning a gold and a silver at the Games repeated the double of medals at the World Cup in Kitakyushu, will try to shine again.
After a 2022 full of great events, 2023 will already be a pre-Olympic and Pan-American Games year in Santiago. So, for the COB, despite the 2021 season having barely ended, the thinking is already of someone who is in the middle of the Paris cycle.
The second semester had encouraging results, mainly from young athletes, in World Cups of various modalities. Among the highlights are the gold in the heel and the silver in Rebeca’s asymmetric bars; the double of Pamela Rosa and Rayssa Leal in Street League Skateboarding; the triple podium of Gabriel Medina, Filipe Toledo and Italo Ferreira in the World Surf League; and Marcus D’Almeida’s silver, at the Archery World Championship, and Keno Marley Machado, at the Boxing World Championship.
Sailors Martine Grael and Kahena Kunze, two-time Olympic champions, took bronze at the Worlds in the 49er FX class. At the weightlifting World Championship, the country won two unprecedented medals with women: Laura Amaro, silver in the sprint in the 76 kg category, and Amanda Schott, bronze in the sprint in the 87 kg category.
Unlike the Olympics competition, which only considers the final sum of the weights, the Worlds gives separate medals for the results obtained in the pulling and throwing movements.
Other positive results in different World Cups, although without medals, were the presence of table tennis player Hugo Calderano in the quarterfinals, when he took the turn of Chinese Liang Jingkun and stopped for a podium game, and the women’s handball team campaign until the same phase.
After the retirement of its most established player, Duda Amorim, the team led by coach Cristiano Rocha had a good performance and had the best result since the 2013 title.
At the Junior Pan American Games in Cali, an under-23 event held for the first time in November, Brazil finished in first position in the medals table.
The second half also saw movement by the COB to prepare the Paris-2024 operation. In October, the committee made its third visit to the host country. In addition to going to Paris, he visited Marseilles, which will host the sailing competition, to choose the location that will house a delegation base.
As costs in the French capital and its surroundings are high, according to Bichara, the COB’s idea is to have the minimum necessary bases in France and keep the teams in other European countries, in which they are already used to working, until shortly before the competitions .
The training center in Rio Maior, Portugal, which has hosted Brazilian training since 2020, should be an important point of preparation.
All this planning, of course, depends on the pandemic no longer being an obstacle in two and a half years, a factor that the sport and the world still cannot afford to ignore.
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