Riding on the extraordinary surfing of a slew of Ticos, the best of whom ended up in 2nd place overall in the IX Pan American Surfing Games, the Costa Rica National Surf Team today made history by placing 2nd in the Games that took place at Playa Olivenca de Ilhéus – Bahia, Brazil.
With the skills of Jason Torres earning his first silver medal in the Open, Costa Rica secured its 4th consecutive pódium visit at the PanAmerican Surfing Games since 2003. In this opportunity, however, rather than mining Bronze and Copper as before, the overall points earned by the team resulted in their earning a silver medal and a subchampionship at these PanAmerican Surfing Games.
This team silver medal is even more significant since Costa Rica competed in Brazil with an incomplete team. From the nine selections that arrived here, only Peru, Venezuela and Guadalupe brought the full 15 athletes for the 6 categories. Costa Rica took 8 competitors.
“We do not really believe it,” said José Ureña, President of the Federacion de Surf de Costa Rica and Technical Director of the Costa Rica National Surf Team. “The praises of the other teams and people who followed up in these competitive days came at us from all sides. It’s not something that we can say enough, but the work that we managed to do has been even better because we arrived here with only 60 percent of a team.”
