The Colombian women’s sport is on the rise, because in different collective and individual disciplines they are demonstrating their full potential, not only with courage, but with evident talent, expressed on each field, on each track and in each field where they put their ability and ambition to play victory.
In football, a new golden age is being experienced at the national team level, with great results, which speak of the need to strengthen the local league, so that those victories are even better. There are also volleyball players who are delivering good harvests, as the team that has quotas for the Pan American and World Cup has just done. And the list goes on, with the splendor of the cyclists, as in the Vuelta Colombia, or the resistance of the pilot Tatiana Calderon. And to raise expectations, the new Sports Minister, Maria Isabel Urrutia, begins his period with great challenges. Panorama.
The sub-20, a powerful generation
Colombian women’s soccer at the national team level is still in rage after the senior team’s subtitle in the recent Copa América. Now it is the sub-20 team that wants to go very far in the World Cup that takes place in Costa Rica, and in which it had an impressive debut, with an unexpected victory against the powerful Germany, triple world champion, to which defeated 1-0 with a goal from Mariana Muñoz.
The national team, led by coach Carlos Paniagua, tied this Saturday against Mexico 0-0 and leads group B, which also includes New Zealand, its third rival, on Tuesday. The first goal is to qualify for the quarterfinals, but this team dreams big, with players like LInda Caicedo, Gisela Robledo or Gabriela Rodríguez, in addition to the goalkeeper Natalia Giraldo, who are banners of this team. The soccer players have already stated that they go for everything, that they feel capable of fighting against any rival, but they go step by step.
This team managed to qualify for the World Cup, something that had not been achieved since 2010, after achieving the subtitle in the South American Championship in Chile. The moment could not be more splendid, since the senior team qualified for the 2023 World Cup, and the U-17, for India, in October.
Volleyball team, convinced of their power
The Colombian Volleyball Team has become a benchmark in the country’s sport. Not only because of their results, but because on the field they reflect that desire to get ahead, that drive to win and achieve the goals set. Directed by the Brazilian Antonio Rizola, who arrived in Colombia after being part of the coaching staff of his country’s teams, with whom he won Olympic medals. He has become like a father to them.
From his hand, the selected team achieved the silver medal at the last Pan American Games in Lima (Peru), in 2019, in an event never seen before. The sextet qualified for the World Cup by defeating the unbeatable Brazil in the final and will go to that contest, which will take place from September 21 to October 15 in the Netherlands and Poland in search of the best possible position.
The week ends with the quota for the Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile in 2023, after defeating Peru and losing to Argentina. Although the option of going to the Tokyo Olympicsthis group began to assemble with the clear objective of going to the Paris-2024, the path on which it is traveling.
Muriel Coneo and María Alejandra Marín are the two most representative players of the group, which with little has managed to unite a country around a team sport in which Colombia had not been strong.
Calderón, the pilot who does not stop in the face of adversity
Tatiana Calderon You don’t know what it’s like to give up. Accustomed to paddling against the tide in a sport historically dominated by men, the pilot from Bogotá has broken barriers with each acceleration. This year, after she was the first woman to reach a podium in British Formula 3, she was the first woman to participate in Formula 2, the first woman to compete in the Japan Super Formula and the first Latin American to drive a Formula 1 car, she became the first woman to race in IndyCar regularly since 2013.
However, in the midst of the feat, his season as a debutant in the highest category of North American motorsports has been cut short for a month due to a delay in payments from ROKiT, his sponsor, to AJ Foyt, his team. Due to this impasse, Calderón has missed three races that represented the ideal opportunity to continue demonstrating his abilities. Still, he doesn’t lose faith and is doing his best to be back in his natural habitat: the tracks.
With this panorama, it shines that his best result in seven races has been higher than the thirteen that one of his teammates has run and 85% of those disputed by the other colleague. This, considering that his team is far from being one of the most powerful. “Sometimes I feel that women are ‘sent there’, but without tools, very much like ‘make a career and that’s it’. One cannot be compared with the drivers who are in the best teams, who have been in Indy for years and who have everything already structured.
What women need is to have an opportunity like the others. It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but we don’t have it. The number of female runners in motorsports has increased, but we no longer need the push to participate but to win. For that you need to be in the best teams and have one of the best cars”, she confessed exclusively to this newspaper (Read the full interview with Calderón here).
Diana and Martha, pedaling
The route and the track continue to represent triumphs for cycling in the country. The Vuelta a Colombia Femenina ends today with a circuit in Bucaramanga, after six stages and the start in Sopó, where 152 riders started. Diana Carolina Penuela is the news, because he has won four stages in a row and will have the opportunity to celebrate his first title in this competition.
He is 36 years old, he came to cycling late, at 24, but he has managed to carve out a great career. This year has been excellent for her, because in addition to the Vuelta title she won the national cycling road test.
And on the track Martha Bayona is the biggest representative. The sprinter from Santander has bathed in gold. In the last Bolivarian Games of Valledupar, the Colombian delegation won 12 golds out of 12 possible, swept the tests and Bayona obtained the titles in individual speed, team speed and keirin.
Similarly, she is the Colombian cyclist who has won the most gold in the history of the Nations Cup, formerly called the World Cup, since in the history of this event she has obtained 10 gold medals. Bayona also won the silver medal at the 2017 Track World Championships.
Urrutia, at the head of the sport
Maria Isabel Urrutia, the gold medalist at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, came to the post of Sports Minister with many projects and great challenges. She has in mind to promote the most excluded sport, in the most remote areas of the country, promote sport in boys and girls, guarantee the continuity of high performance programs and obtain resources. One of her great challenges will be the contribution she can give to the strengthening of women’s soccer, in a joint effort with Dimayor, which is the entity that organizes the professional championship.
Urrutia told EL TIEMPO that she will give all her support to women’s soccer: “that the right to work be recognized, give them guarantees.” The minister has already had approaches with some directors of Colombian soccer. The women’s league is planned to have competition all year from 2023, if the resources materialize. EL TIEMPO learned that Dimayor already has contacts with a “large company” to assume sponsorship, with an initial three-year project. With Urrutia at the helm, the athletes will have support so that they are treated fairly.
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