The Ministry of Sports in Colombia went from a woman known to almost every citizen, gold medalist María Isabel Urrutia, to an unknown among politicians and athletes, academic Astrid Rodríguez. Urrutia arrived with some political experience, having been a former congressman from 2002 to 2010, and is leaving the ministry on charges of “indecent dealings” with the state budget. The new minister has never held a public office, but has been teaching for more than 20 years.
“We want to set priorities [la educación física] at school, school, childhood, youth,” said President Gustavo Petro at the inauguration of the new minister. “This is an issue that has not progressed in the last six months,” he added, explaining that access to sport must be a key backbone of the government’s proposed sweeping healthcare reform. The President said that this time he was looking for a sports educator inspired by the work of Víctor Jairo Chinchilla, a physical education teacher when he was a young guerrilla fighter in Zipaquirá, who taught him about sports as “a way of healthy prevention”. . The new minister must carry on her legacy.
Astrid Rodríguez is from Bogotá and has a degree in Physical Education from the Public Pedagogical University, a Masters in Pedagogy and a PhD in Social Sciences. She has worked for more than a decade at the University of Education in the Department of Sport, where she has published research on how public space is positively changed through leisure and sport activities, or the importance of pedagogy in physical education.
His doctoral thesis focused on the historical consideration of the Bogotá bike path over several decades, as well as an opportunity to practice sport, a political commitment to change the way citizens interact with public spaces. He also made a short documentary with a group of colleagues about how a group of young skaters appropriated a public space that used to be a “trolleybus graveyard”, the Estación Park, to encourage physical activity and the first great bowl for Skaters build the city.
The Ministry of Sport is a new institution. It was created in 2019 during the government of Iván Duque as a reinforced version of a smaller 1968 institution called Coldeportes. President Gustavo Petro informed Rodríguez on his Twitter account that the ministry will be judged “for the first time” by a sports educator. The closest precedent is that Mike Forero Nougués, also a physical education graduate, was director of Coldeportes from 1978 to 1982. But a minister at Duque, and the first person appointed to head that department, was lawyer Eduardo Lucena. “Physical education of children and youth in the study centers and general physical activity of the population will be our priority,” President Petro added.
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The controversial departure of Urrutia, who is accused of signing more than 200 contracts when the president asked her to resign, will draw attention to the management Rodríguez is now giving to the company with much of the budget handed over by the former minister was bound . Rodríguez does not appear to hail from a political sector that has historically dominated that sports sector (the La U party led by Dilian Francisca Toro) nor close to Urrutia, but her anonymity among athletes is viewed with suspicion – she is neither in the country’s main sports federations such as cycling or football, still known in the country’s Olympic Committee.
“I’ve asked managers, directors, presidents of sports federations and athletes, and none of those I’ve called have been able to give me a reason. I spoke to a couple of reputable government officials and they didn’t know who he was either,” wrote Gabriel Meluk, sports editor of El Tiempo newspaper. “I suspect that his inclusion in the newest department of the federal cabinet corresponds to the ideology of sport as a community builder,” he adds. “But for the ‘sport-sport’, the one that produces champions and medals and trophies and gets people to put on their shirts to give a speech on a balcony, well no…” he concludes.
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