Luis Ortega I Añora (Córdoba), (EFE) cucaña and whose heat from its “Olympic flame” has reached Paris, site of the next Olympic Games in 2024.
Specifically, with the presence in Cordoba of a very special team from Le Mee Sur Seine, a French town near Paris and whose captain will be the mayor of the municipality himself, which shows the international dimension that the rural Olympic event is beginning to have. , as stressed to EFE by the councilor of Añora, Bartolomé Madrid.
In round figures there are almost 1,000 participants, close to a hundred volunteers and 48 teams from different parts of Spain, as well as France, who will compete until tomorrow in 16 events, an appointment that has a budget of 80,000 euros with the main objective of recovering traditional games “but with the rules of the 21st century”.
Leave the Play and play
“Leave Play now and come play,” the competition organizers expressed to the more than 4,000 people who attended the opening ceremony of the Los Pedroches Rural Olympics last night, in which the usual parade of teams took place before to dispute the first scoring tests.
Bartolomé Madrid has highlighted that it is one of the events that “more and better vindicates rural pride and the sense of belonging to this region”, a recovery of the “traditions” that “adapt to the times as a symbol of the capacity that we have”.
Throughout the day of this Saturday, with a strong progressive heat in this area of the north of Córdoba, where supply problems are being experienced and a call is made for “responsible consumption”, important scoring tests take place such as the competition of the mizos , a kind of rural bowling, followed by the tiraeras, the cobblestone or the sacks.
There will be the usual stilt race, the ribbons, the rope, the wheelbarrow or the queen’s chair, while the day will end with the test of the jacks, which will give way to the great brotherhood festival of all the participating teams, Madrid stands out.
Rural development with a unique event
This is already a benchmark event in Andalusia, according to what the delegate of Tourism, Culture and Sports of the Junta in Córdoba, Eduardo Lucena, explains to EFE, who extols the example of seeing “a town devoted to tradition” and that bets on its time “because of its development with this type of event.”
Likewise, the president of the Córdoba Provincial Council, Salvador Fuentes, shows EFE his “pride” for an appointment that has endured over time since its launch in 2008 and that has become a “blessed madness” that manages to “invigorate the rural world” and that it is a “paradigm of coexistence, generational interest and a very unique and very different competition”.
In addition to the French team, the presence of a team from Jerez de la Frontera with two Olympic members such as Mercedes Chilla, who played the games in Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008 in the javelin modality, or Begoña García, also present at the Greek event, stands out. with the Spanish basketball team with which he achieved an Olympic diploma.
A traditional event that this year reaches a French team and that next year will be held under the heat of an Olympic flame that will be lit in Paris 2024. EFE