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What connects Carlos Lopes, Rosa Mota, Fernanda Ribeiro, Nélson Évora, Pedro Pichardo, Iuri Leitão, and Rui Oliveira? Olympic gold. The first happened on August 12, 1984, exactly 40 years ago!
Exactly 40 years ago, a large part of the Portuguese population was in front of a television, around three in the morning, drinking coffee after coffee and rubbing their eyes to hide the sleepiness, trying to stay awake to watch the final part of the marathon of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. At about the 35-kilometer mark, nearly one hour and fifty-five minutes into the race, Charles Spedding, who was leading, looked to his side and was stunned. A 37-year-old Portuguese runner was just a meter behind him, running effortlessly even in the sweltering heat. The Englishman thought, “How is it possible that he is running with his mouth closed after 35 kilometers?!”
There were just over seven kilometers to go before the leaders of the marathon entered the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and from there it would be a festival. That Portuguese runner, 37 years old and thin as a straw, quickly gained an advantage over Charles Spedding and John Treacy: five meters, 25 meters, 50 meters, 100 meters. When he ran through the tunnel leading to the entrance of the Olympic stadium, there was a 200-meter gap between the Portuguese, the Englishman, and the Irishman. On the tartan track, where he would run the last 550 meters, in front of more than 90,000 people, the Portuguese heard the loudest applause of his career. Now, with his mouth no longer closed but half-open in a wide smile of someone who knows that, in just over two minutes, he will be crowned the first Olympic champion in the history of Portuguese sports. Yes, it seems like it was just yesterday that those Portuguese coffee drinkers saw, for the first time, the Olympic gold on the chest of a Portuguese, but it was exactly 40 years ago: August 12, 1984.
Portugal was orphaned of genius like this. Joaquim Agostinho, the great cyclist who had charmed the country for a decade and a half, had died three months and two days before. António Livramento, the superb hockey player, was 41 years old and had hung up his skates several years earlier. Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, the extraordinary footballer who led Benfica and the National Team between 1962 and 1975, was 42 years old and his last game was in 1980, playing for the Buffalo Stallions in an indoor tournament. Even with good participation from football in Euro 1984, with an honorable 3rd place, Portugal remained, ten years after April 25, 1974, a very gray and dull country. Until the hero of Los Angeles, who had already been a hero in Chepstow, Montreal, and New York, consolidated himself as the greatest hero among the greatest heroes of Portugal.
The name of that hero, that 37-year-old Portuguese runner, thin as a straw, is easy to pronounce: Carlos Alberto de Sousa Lopes. Four names for Portugal’s eternal history. The first Portuguese Olympic champion, just as Rosa Maria Correia dos Santos Mota was the first Portuguese woman Olympic champion (marathon-1988), Maria Fernanda Moreira Ribeiro was the first Olympic champion in a track event (10,000 m-1996), Nélson Évora was the first Olympic champion in a technical discipline (triple jump-2008), Pedro Pablo Pichardo Peralta was the first Olympic champion with no Portuguese ancestry (triple jump-2020), and now Iuri Leitão/Rui Oliveira, the first Olympic champions outside of athletics (and Iuri the first with two medals in the same edition!). Between Carlos Alberto de Sousa Lopes (12/08/1984) and Iúri Gabriel Dantas Leitão/Rui Filipe Alves Oliveira (10/08/2024), there is a gap of 39 years and 363 days. Rui Oliveira’s broad smile is unforgettable, just as the day August 12, 1984 is unforgettable: exactly forty years.