The Island Council supports the Paralympic Relay program to promote and encourage sport

The Tenerife Island Council, through its Councilor for Sports, Concepción Rivero, and the Spanish Paralympic Committee recently held a meeting to learn about the Paralympic Relay program, which aims to identify, recruit, and promote Paralympic athletes in the Canary Islands and help them advance to high-level competition.

The Councilor expressed her full support for this initiative and emphasized the importance of creating synergies between institutions to improve the current situation regarding physical activity and sports for people with disabilities.

Furthermore, Rivero emphasized that this project can complement the new lines of action of the new PADIS program, the Physical Activity and Sports Plan for the Social Inclusion of People with Disabilities in Tenerife, which replaces the former PIDA program. This follows a diagnostic and design study developed in collaboration with the University of La Laguna (ULL), which aims to focus efforts on promoting inclusive, local sports, in addition to continuing the lines of action that the previous plan had been developing.

At this meeting, the Paralympic Committee reported the need to develop this program in conjunction with the different autonomous communities, in order to counteract the significant decline in athletes with disabilities that has occurred in recent years.

The Paralympic Relay aims to work in the long term, creating a network to promote sport for people with disabilities, in which all involved entities can access training and resources to grow their inclusive sports offering, thus encouraging an increase in the population with disabilities who practice some sporting activity continuously over time, and thus favoring the recruitment of sporting talents who can continue their sporting career to the elite.