The Island Council is launching a “Throwing School” at CIAT that will benefit athletics on the island

The Island Council is launching a “Throwing School” at the Tenerife Athletics Center (CIAT) that will cover both training and technical development. The island’s Sports Minister, Yolanda Moliné, met this week with representatives from track and field clubs across the island to inform them about this innovative project, which will be led by former Olympic discus thrower Mario Pestano and will serve as another resource available to the island’s clubs.

Yolanda Moliné explains, “This very week will mark the start of the first phase of the project, which will focus specifically on promoting track and field—with a special emphasis on throwing events—and recruiting athletes from schools across the island to attract new talent to this discipline.”

The Sports Minister, who was accompanied at the meetings by the president of the Island Athletics Federation, Ernesto Rodríguez, emphasized that the school—which is aimed at athletes over the age of 12—“will also focus on improving the skills of athletes who are already involved in this highly technical and specialized discipline of throwing events, so the project will benefit athletes from clubs that practice this discipline.”

The school will be led by former Olympic discus thrower Mario Pestano, who, in addition to being a national coach and senior track and field coach, has an impressive list of athletic achievements. Pestano has competed in three Olympic Games (Athens, Beijing, and London), has been Spanish champion 13 times, has broken his own national record on numerous occasions, was a two-time Olympic finalist, won the 2005 Mediterranean Games, the 2010 Ibero-American Games, and the 2008 World Athletics Final.

Accompanied by Pestano himself and by Ideco’s CEO, Manolo Gómez, the island’s Sports Minister presented the new CIAT project to some twenty clubs from the north, south, and metropolitan area to provide them with details of this initiative—which the clubs themselves can use as a resource—and whose goal is to strengthen this athletic discipline.