Paralympics Diary: A long way to go

The last days, I realized why everybody in Main Press Center and in Olympic Park uses running shoes every single day! In one of the first days of competitions, my (long) journey started at 6 o’clock and at 9 I was at Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas – a beautiful place when it’s sunny, but it was raining that day. The weather was very non-Rio de Janeiro style, but that’s okay. I watched the rowing competitions – and Brazil had great results, but at the finals we did not win any medal. I really like to cover sport events outside and now the weather is better in Rio.

After that, I came back to Olympic Park – a 30 minutes distance by bus. The view from the shuttle window is awesome. It’s really close to some carioca beaches – that´s another positive point to cover sports outside, at Copacaba Cluster. In the afternoon, I took another bus: this time to Riocentro, to watch table tennis. It´s incredible how brazilians are envolved with Paralympics, they are supporting really well the athletes, even in the sports that are not so popular.

My last stop was in the swimming competition, when we were having finals in a lot of categories. The brazilian swimmer Phelipe Rodrigues won silver for 50m freestyle. It’s was a great moment, people are saying his name when he posed on the podium. In the mixed zone, he told me “I usually don´t be too emotive. I cried on the podium, because I never expected to see such an amount of people on the Arenas, supporting us”. At the end of the day, I had a long walk back. Well, maybe I will need new shoes. 

Letícia Paiva