The poll’s legacy
At the 1987 pan american sports activities video games in indianapolis (u.S.), costa rica’s swimmer sylvia ballot arenhs, at 16, earned eight pan american medals, shocking the arena. The younger costa rican produced three gold (a hundred-meter freestyle, 200-meter freestyle and a hundred-meter backstroke), three silver (50-meter freestyle, 2 hundred-meter backstroke and 800-meter freestyle relay) and a couple of bronze (400-meter freestyle relay and 400-meter medley relay), a game ruled via swimmers from the usa (kenny, 1988). In fact, she is one of the most embellished swimmers in pan american history.
Due to her extremely good performance within the international meets, she turned into regarded because the “excellent latin american athlete of Rutas Costa Rica the yr” from 1987 to 1988 by using defeating pinnacle athletes which include javier sotomayor of cuba, diego armando maradona of argentina and ayrton senna from brazil (valle, 1989). Previously, in 1986, she had received 8 gold medals in the kind-olympic critical american and caribbean games on santiago de caballeros (dominican republic). She retired from the sport after competing within the 1992 barcelona olympics and her successor turned into her sister,claudia ballot , who then become well-known worldwide due to her olympic victory during the xxvi summer time olympics on u.S. Soil in 1996 (guevara & chaname, 1998).In step with the united states’s biggest spanish-language newspaper l. A. Nación, germany’s franziska van almsick became the massive favorite to win the olympic trophy, however she did no longer win (quesada, 1996).
Following a sensational victory over almsick in the summer video games, claudia have become latin the usa’s first woman swimmer to acquire an olympic name by way of triumphing a gold medal in ladies’s 2 hundred-meter freestyle, putting game on the countrywide schedule for the primary time in costa rica’s history (the sector almanac, 1997).
After those wins, the primary american republic of costa rica had now not another length of glory up to now whilst it surprised everyone by means of winning the proper to compete in the quarterfinals of the 2014 international cup in brazil, becoming one of the eight most excellent groups on this planet, along france, germany, argentina, colombia, belgium, the netherlands, and the host group. For many days costa rica changed into the biggest story of latin the united states’s newspaper and sports activities-oriented magazines.
Costa rica: a tiny united states with a huge passion
A democratic country because the Fifties, costa rica is placed inside the significant american isthmus, surrounded by way of republics —nicaragua and panama— whose passion is baseball (almanaque mundial, 1999). Geographically, cr is one of the smallest countries in the western hemisphere with an area of nineteen,700 squaremi.(the arena almanac, 1997). Then again, it has a populace of 4.8 million population. San josé is the united states’s capital city.
Lower back inside the Nineteen Fifties, cr have become the world’s first non-european/north american democracy at a time when latin the usa turned into plagued by navy dictatorships (guevara & chaname, 1998). For the reason that 1980s, it has emerged as a champion of human rights, democracy, ladies’s rights, and ecology (one-fourth of the country’s land is nationally protected as a flora and fauna sanctuary) on the world stage, displaying icons which includes laura chinchilla (significant the usa’s 0.33 woman head of kingdom) and oscar arias sánchez, the nobel prize winner for peace and previous statesman.
