Pushing Paraguay to be a major international sports stage in 2030, Paraguayan President Santiago Pena went to International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquarters on Thursday with his country’s bid to be an Olympics host.
Paraguay wants to host the 2030 Youth Olympics in its capital, Asuncion, in the same year it would stage one of the opening games of the men’s soccer World Cup.
“The idea behind this is to make Paraguay the center for many of these major sporting events,” Pena told reporters after leading a delegation to meet IOC president Thomas Bach.
Photo: AP
The scale of the Youth Olympics — which had about 4,000 athletes in 32 sports when last held in 2018 in Buenos Aires — is similar to the Junior Pan-American Games that Paraguay is to host in August.
“We have the organizational capacity,” said the Paraguayan president for the past 18 months, who acknowledged his country of about 7 million people is too little known globally.
“I would say that half the population never heard about Paraguay,” he said, suggesting it is “an exotic name” that perhaps intrigued people to discover more.
Hosting international sports can be a faster path to international recognition, and Paraguay also is bidding for the 2031 Pan-American Games.
“It’s an opportunity to raise the level of knowledge about the country,” said Pena, an economist educated at Columbia University in New York. “For many years the country has remained a little bit isolated. It was not an active participant in many of these sports events.”
Men’s soccer has been a standout, earning Paraguay its only Olympic medal — a silver at the 2004 Athens Games. The team is on pace to qualify for the men’s 2026 FIFA World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.
Paraguay has got direct entry to the 2030 edition as one of the unprecedented six co-host nations across three continents for the centenary World Cup.
Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay, the inaugural 1930 host, each get one game before the rest of the 104-game tournament moves to Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The deal struck at FIFA and announced in October 2023 opened the way for Saudi Arabia to be awarded the 2034 tournament without a rival bid.
Pena has since met regularly, including in July last year at the Paris Olympics, with FIFA president Gianni Infantino who would chair the soccer body’s next annual meeting in Asuncion in May.
“I have to take a little bit of ownership on that,” Pena said. “I met with president Infantino in December 2023 and I proposed that he host a FIFA event in Paraguay.”
Infantino is also an IOC member who votes for the 2030 Youth Olympics candidate that is offered for approval. Interest also has been shown by Denmark, India and Thailand. The 2026 edition is scheduled for Dakar, Senegal.
A decision on 2030 could come this year, although Bach formally leaves office in June.
“President Bach has been very generous with myself and with Paraguay,” Pena said.
“He is leaving behind a great legacy and hopefully in the coming months we can see a confirmation that Paraguay will be hosting the [Youth] Olympic Games,” he said.
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