"I have been the president of the Chilean Judo Federation since 2021. Of course, judo is not the number one sport today in the country, if you compare it to football for instance, but it's growing and we are really happy when we see how much it has developed recently. What I can say is that people are passionate about judo in Chile and that we want it go deeper into the roots of society.
Today we have 147 clubs and precisely 4793 judoka in Chile. Altogether we have 213 coaches and 102 referees. We follow those numbers very closely. When we took over the federation in 2021, there were 99 clubs and roughly 1700 judoka. This was before the global pandemic. Since then the progression is massive.
There are many reasons for this development. One of the reasons is that we organise regular tournaments that are meant to be attractive for the participants. We want to motivate people to compete. For that we developed strong partnerships with national institutions including the police, the Air Force and the Navy. That has given us the possibility to increase the number of available facilities. We also organise international training camps to also attract judoka from abroad.
From a competition point of view, we want to increase our Olympic participation. Since Sydney, we always had one athlete qualified for the Games. In Paris, for the first time, we had two, which made us the only country in the region that increased our participation. It was really great for us. So generally speaking we want to increase our international participation.
We also want to have more people practising judo in Chile at the grassroots level and to include judo in our schools. The more young people practising, the better it is. I believe that the judo values are necessary for society.
In the past, we already organised the 2017 Cadet World Championships and the last continental event for seniors was held here back in 1994. So having this continental championships in 2025, for two continents, makes the event the biggest ever for seniors, organised in Chile. The level of the athletes and the number of athletes is even higher than the Panam Games 2023 that took place in Santiago.
If we count the management, the referees, coaches and the volunteers, up to 40 people were involved with the organisation of this event. It represents several months of hard work. When we arrived in the venue a few days ago, most of the work was done, we just had to fix the details. We have strong support from the government, sponsors, the National Olympic Committee and from technical providers.
If you ask me how I feel today, I am happy, proud and honoured to be here, to see this and to share the event with our athletes, from Panamerica and Oceania. This event puts our country to another level. To show that Chile is capable of organising such an event is important.
I am also proud that we have the support of the IJF and to have many IJF representatives join us on this special occasion. We wanted to demonstrate our capabilities and we hope everyone will be satisfied. Thank you all for the support and for being here to share judo and happiness."
Marcelo Simian is a proud and happy president and there are many reasons for him to feel that way. Judo in Chile is growing, in terms of results and now in terms of capacity to organise big events. Congratulations!