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Athlete Pedro Pichardo brought to Portugal a gold medal at the Olympic Games. The President of the Republic welcomed the award and made a speech for “integration” and against racism.
“It’s good for us to think that, of the four medal winners, three are of direct or indirect African origin: one Portuguese Afro-Cuban, one Portuguese Angolan, another Portuguese Sao Tome. This really shows that Portugal is great when it achieves the effective integration of those who come from abroad, were born here, or were not born here and arrived here in the course of their lives”, said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
But this view is not shared by everyone. The CDU candidate for the Aveiro Chamber and former MEP Miguel Viegas reacted to Pichardo’s (Cuban origin) victory with a post on Facebook, saying that “this is certainly not a 100% Portuguese medal.”
Speaking to the magazine Sábado, Miguel Viegas says that Pichardo’s victory does not attribute “the same weight as to any of the other medals so far, whether in judo, women’s triple jump, or canoeing, which are athletes who did the their training and that they are in fact a genuine product of what is actually done here at the level of clubs and federations”.
“The other is an athlete who went down here with a parachute, he naturally has his merits. There is no ethnic, racial, immigration connotation here, none of that”, he explained to the same magazine.
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