The 24-year-old Spanish footballer leveled the score in the men’s gold medal match between Spain and Brazil, 1-1, at the 2020 Tokyo Games, but La Roja ultimately had to settle for silver.
Coach Luis de la Fuente’s team went into the game undefeated in the competition, although they went to extra time in both their quarterfinal and semifinal ties.
Brazil had Everton’s Richarlison to call upon, the competition’s top scorer with five goals, as well as Dani Alves, who – at 38 – was looking to win the 44th title of his storied career.
Brazil had an excellent chance to take the lead early when they earned a penalty kick after Unai Simon clattered Matheus Cunha. Richarlison stepped up to the plate, but blazed his effort high and wide. The selecao got their breakthrough soon after, however, with Cunha finishing superbly after Alves teed him up artfully, before Mikel Oyarzabal, assisted by Carlos Soler, got Spain back on level terms with an absolutely stunning volley to force extra time.
Malcolm emerged as the hero for Brazil, though, as he raced free and slotted home past the heroic Unai Simon to clinch the gold medal for the South American nation.
Brazil would edge past Spain 2-1 to win its second-straight Olympic title.
They also become just the fifth team in Olympics history to win consecutive titles in men’s soccer.
It’s the third silver for Spain after being the runner-up at the 1920 Antwerp Games and the 2000 Sydney Games.
Spain’s lone Olympic gold came at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
Luis López Carrasco is celebrating his big Discovery…
The 39-year-old Spanish filmmaker took home the Best International Film prize for his documentary The Year of the Discovery (El año del descubrimiento) on Sunday at Argentina’s Mar del PlataInternational Film Festival, the only Latin American film fest granted a Category A status by producers association FIAPF, placing it in the same league as the Cannes Film Festival, VeniceFilm Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival and Locarno Film Festival, among others.
Due to the restraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival hosted an online edition and offered free access to all Argentine residents.
Carrasco’s sophomore feature follows his debut film El Futuro, which premiered at Locarno and collected numerous awards on the festival circuit.
The Year of the Discovery portrays the flipside of 1992 Spain, which celebrated hosting the 1992 Barcelona Games and the World Expo in Seville while in Murcia, south-east Spain, enraged workers from the naval, mining and chemical sectors where companies were shut down, battled alongside students against the police, culminating with the launch of Molotov cocktails that set fire to the regional government’s Parliament.
In a video call from Spain, a grateful López Carrasco dedicated the award to his parents and brother “for being the people who most taught me how to listen.”
Colombian Camilo Restrepo’s Los Conductos won the best film prize in the festival’s Latin American competition. Winner of last year’s Mar del Plata Work in Progress competition, Los Conductos marks an attempt to explore Colombia’s civil conflicts with a style outside the canons of social realism as it follows a man in his attempts to flee from a sect and the trauma that still haunts him.
Maria Alvarez’s The Lost Time (El Tiempo Perdido) trounced a strong lineup in the Argentine competition, which included notable titles like Esquirlas, The History of the Occult and Las Ranas, to nab the best Argentine film prize.
In The Lost Time, a group of now aged friends find new and personal meaning in Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time at each of the 18 years they have gathered at a Buenos Aires bar to discuss it.
“In this online edition, more than 200,000 people saw the films we have programmed, and on YouTube, more than 180,000 people followed our events, so I congratulate the public who have known how to adapt to our circumstances,” said festival president Fernando Juan Lima at the online closing ceremony. “We miss the City of Mar del Plata and its movie theaters, but we are going to return,” he declared.
“We celebrate [the festival’s] continuity even with the challenges that the pandemic has imposed on us,” concurred festival artistic director Cecilia Barrionuevo. The festival paid homage to filmmaker-politician Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas, Argentine actress-writer-director Maria Luisa Bemberg and, naturally, Argentina’s greatest hero, soccer star Diego Maradona, who died Nov. 25 from heart failure.
Augusto Costa, minister of production, science, and technological innovation, also announced that Mar del Plata would be the site of the fifth regional headquarters of Argentine film school, Enerc.
“From the government and from the ministry, we reaffirm our absolute commitment to the festival and to the audiovisual industry of the province,” said Costa.
2020 MAR DEL PLATA ASTOR PIAZZOLLA PRIZES
OFFICIAL INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
BEST FILM “The Year of the Discovery,” (Luis López Carrasco, Spain, Switzerland)
BEST DIRECTOR Matías Piñeiro, (“Isabella,” Argentina)
BEST PERFORMANCE María Villar, (“Isabella,” Argentina)
BEST SCREENPLAY
Nicolás Prividera, (“A Farewell to Memory,” Argentina)
SPECIAL JURY “Moving On,” (Yoon Dan-bi, Korea)
LATIN AMERICAN COMPETITION
BEST FILM “Los Conductos,” (Camilo Restrepo, Colombia, Brazil, France)
SPECIAL MENTION “Mascarados,” (Marcela Borela and Henrique Borela, Brazil)
SPECIAL MENTION “Fauna,” (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico)
BEST SHORT “Correspondence,” (Dominga Sotomayor and Carla Simón, Chile)
ARGENTINE COMPETITION
BEST FILM “The Lost Time,” (María Álvarez, Argentina)
SPECIAL MENTION “Las Ranas,” (Edgardo Castro, Argentina)
BEST SHORT “Homage to the Work of Philip Henry Gosse,” (Pablo Martín Weber)
BEST DIRECTOR “Esquirlas,” (Natalia Garayalde, Argentina)
ALTERNATE STATES
BEST FILM
“My Dear Spies,” (Vladimir Léon, France)
SPECIAL MENTION “Heliconia,” (Paula Rodríguez Polanco, France, Colombia)
WORK IN PROGRESS
BEST PROJECT “Morichales,” (Chris Gude, Colombia, U.S.)
BEST LATIN AMERICAN DEBUT FILM, YOUNG CRITICS PRIZE “History of the Occult,” (Cristian Ponce, Argentina)
The 47-year-old Mexican American former professional boxer and boxing/mixed martial arts promoter says he’s planning to return to the ring.
Twelve years after his last fight, the 11-time titlist confirmed he’s ready to end his retirement.
“The rumors are true, and I’m going to start sparring in the next few weeks,” de la Hoya said.
de la Hoya (39-6 30 KOs) added that he won’t be engaging in an exhibition fight like fellow retired champions Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr.
“It’s a real fight,” he said. “I miss being in the ring, I love boxing. Boxing is what gave me everything I have today, and I just miss it.”
After winning a gold medal for the United States at the 1992 Barcelona Games, de la Hoya had a meteoric rise in the professional ranks, winning the WBO junior lightweight title by stopping Jimmi Bredahl in 10 rounds in 1994, in only his 12th professional bout.
de la Hoya would eventually win major world titles in six different weight classes.
During this stretch, “The Golden Boy” was considered one of the best fighters in boxing and its biggest pay-per-view and gate attraction. He was as marketable outside the ring as he was good inside of it. There are very few fighters who can appear on the cover of Ring Magazine and Newsweek.
de la Hoya’s career came to an ignominious conclusion when he quit on his stool after the eighth round of a fight against Manny Pacquiao in December 2008. A few months later at age 36, de la Hoya announced his retirement.
“Look, my last fight with Pacquiao, I weighed in at 145 and obviously that was a shell of myself,” said de la Hoya of his ill-fated decision to move down to welterweight to face Pacquiao after seven years of campaigning at junior middleweight.
Now, as he’s set to return, de la Hoya understands that many will question his decision.
“Look, it’s been a long time, yes,” said de la Hoya, who was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2014. “But actually my jab feels faster than ever. I have to make sure that my conditioning is perfect, my health is good. And that’s going to take place in the next few weeks. So we’ll see.”
de la Hoya, who has battled drug and alcohol addiction in the past, said he started to get back into shape a couple of months ago, and as he began to feel better and better, the old itch came back.
de la Hoya said he looked around the current landscape of boxing and didn’t like what he saw.
“All these fighters are not of the level that was 15, 20 years [ago], all these fighters are demanding so much money, all these fighters are demanding the moon,” said de la Hoya. “And they’re forgetting that you must train hard, you must work hard. So that’s a huge advantage for me because I know what it takes to train hard, I know how to train smart. I know how to fight smart in the ring.
“These guys are in it just for the money — that’ll be the big difference. I will fight for the glory, and these guys only fight for the money. And guess what? The glory will always win.”
For now, the plan is to compete between 154-160 pounds. As for who he will be targeting?
“Any top guy, any top guy out there,” said de la Hoya.
Mireia Belmonte is officially Spain’s swimming sensation…
The 25-year-old Spanish swimmer raced her way to first place in the Women’s 200 Meter Butterfly at the 2016 Rio Games on Wednesday to become the first Spanish woman to win an Olympic swimming gold medal.
Belmonte, a two-time silver medalist at the 2012 London Games, went a step better than she did at the 2012 Summer Olympics with a winning time of two minutes, 4.85 seconds, the fastest time so far this year.
Australia’s Madeline Groves, who went into the race with the fastest time of 2016, took the silver medal and Japan’s world champion Natsumi Hoshi won bronze.
“I’m still nervous. Nothing comes to mind,” she said when asked what she was thinking about. “The truth is it’s everything I dreamed of and it’s all happened so quickly.”
Her victory was the first for Spain in the Olympic pool since Martin Lopez Zubero won the men’s 200 backstroke at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
She still had to work hard for victory, with Groves leading at the first turn after Hoshi had made the fastest start from the blocks.
Groves was also ahead at the halfway stage but Belmonte came back strongly and dashed her rival’s hopes of becoming the first Australian to win the event since Susan O’Neill at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
