Congratulations to Spain soccer team. In Spain we have the world’s best footballers, as well as many other extraordinary personalities who excel in sport. Theirs is the victory of team spirit over checkbook sport, the triumph of humility over arrogance. When the sounds of joy in our streets still resound in our ears after yesterdays’ rapturous welcoming, we look behind mere appearances and discover the reason for this victory: it springs from a generation of sportsmen and women who, apart from their great quality, excel in seriousness, simplicity, discipline, hard work and humility. We draw an obvious lesson: that with effort, patience and acceptance of many previous defeats everyone can reach very far. From Red Deporte we congratulate them and express our wish: that our society, swimming in this euphoria, may learn from this style of achieving high goals with constant team effort. .
At the same time that we say aloud that these boys have made Spain proud, at the beginning of summer we rremember also many other youngsters who spend part of their holidays –or the whole of it- to work forr no pay in many places of Africa and Latin America (recently, four girls from an NGO lost their lives in an accident in Peru). In Red Deporte we have just returned from South Africa with twelve Spanish boys and girls who went there, not to visit game reserves and luxury resorts, but to stay with other youth from some of South African’s poorest townships, where for the last two years we have been working in an educational project with our local partners, the Salesians. They also deserved to be mentioned in the media.
Our best wish is that this spirit of effort and achievement may continue, in sports as well as in the rest of every-day life. And we hope too that our great footballers, who will receive 600.000 euro each for their victory, may remember that in the African soil where they have played many millions of human beings live on less than one dollar a day, and use their money in a spirit of solidarity.