In the early hours of Sunday to Monday, August 13, 1984, I was 16 years old and at 3 am I was more awake than I had ever been. If you’re reading me and you’re around my age, I bet your smarts were the same as mine.
There are moments when countries come together to celebrate a common destiny, a culture that unites and identifies, a way of living and feeling. We are Portuguese and on that day, incredibly distant, but so close, the windows opened and we heard in every particle of territory happy people shouting the name of a man, a Portuguese: Carlos Lopes.
There had never been a gold medal at an Olympic Games for Portugal. And then at the Marathon, the test of tests, the race that closed the Los Angeles Games, which closed the Olympics.
There’s no way to explain it any other way, I believe there are magical moments when we find ourselves with our own destiny. Carlos Lopes forced him, broke into him with providential self-confidence, as if his victory were inevitable. He was in unique shape, but a few days before traveling to America, when he was training on the Second Circular, a Mercedes ran him over and the news broke on RTP’s Telejornal and was on the cover of all the news the next day – our only hope of winning the Gold had evaporated.
Glory happens when History finds a way to choose its heroes. And that accident, 12 days before the race, ended up making the achievement a unique and unparalleled moment. Despite being the fiercest of all the individual races, Lopes would hardly have found the key to entering Olympus if he hadn’t had the cooperation of a man who wasn’t from here.
The Japanese Kiyoshi Kobayashi, who had left Gunma-Ken for Portugal in the late 1950s, was largely responsible for the recovery of the great athlete that I applaud today. A master who brought judo to Portugal, but also a specialist in Traditional Eastern Medicine. His father was a samurai and he was a man of all seven trades – Kobayashi, for example, created the conditions for Toyota to open its first factory outside of Japan in Ovar.
Mutual aid, cooperativism based on absolute trust, was the miracle before the miracle. Carlos Lopes had done two somersaults in the air and suffered bruises on one hip and one elbow and abrasions all over his body. The disaster could have been fatal to his aspirations, but the Japanese master assured him that it would not. If two years earlier he had been cured of a chronic injury to his Achilles tendon, those injuries were easier to resolve. Lopes believed it and the Japanese man was really right.
But I go back to the big victory. The first Olympic Gold in our history. A moment of collective ecstasy in which everyone, old and young, left and right, believers and non-believers, men and women, illiterates and professors, came together to smile and celebrate the common adventure of being Portuguese, a destiny that unites us despite our differences, an individual victory that creates a collective fraternity, as my friend Edgar Morin so well says.
An unforgettable moment for me too; I place it on the same shelf as the first trip outside of what I knew, the books I loved, the discovery of spirituality, the end of the course, the importance of Jacques Maritain’s personalism.
Carlos Lopes has lived in the parish of Silveira, in Torres Vedras, for many years.
This Friday I have a huge honor in being able, on behalf of the Caixa Agrícola that I lead, to pay homage to this Portuguese hero. The pioneer of Athletics as a unique sport – his first silver medal at the Montreal Games in 1976 is unforgettable, second only to Lasse Viren who, many swear, had a transfusion with snake blood.
Carlos Lopes, to whom Mário Soares owes part of his presidential victory, his support became decisive, and to whom the country owes the ability to have proven that nothing is impossible when we truly trust who we are and where we come from.
Thank you, dear Carlos.
We meet in Silveira.
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