ABOUT US?
Sponsor an athlete is an NGO registered in the National Registry of Associations, whose purpose is to carry out projects that provide solutions to the problems faced by African athletes. In particular, targeting young talents and elite Ethiopian athletes who have little or no support.
Specifically, we work to improve the sports conditions of athletes, both by providing material and essential services for elite sport. By improving these sports conditions it is intended to generate an improvement in the performance of athletes. Improving their performance allows them not only to have more possibilities to compete and win races with which to sustain themselves, but they can also accredit better times by making organizers of other races pay attention to them and invite them to run, exponentially growing their opportunities.
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WHERE WE ARE?
Our activity is centered around Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, in the center of the country. We work with a small athletic team that trains here and is led by Demesse, a great ex-athlete now-turned-coach. At the same time, in Spain, we hold events, collect material and donations and search for funding.
THE TEAM
Antonio de la Peña Calleja:
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President of the Association Sponsor an athlete. With studies in Aerospace Engineering and student of the Master in Strategies and Technologies for Development. Athlete of the Diablillos de Rivas Triathlon Club for more than 15 years. His first contact with Ethiopian athletics was in 2016, when during a volunteer service he met and began training with Adawork Aberta Sadura, a young local athlete. Since then the involvement with this sport has been progressively increasing until today, with the creation and direction of the Association Sponsors an Athlete.
Demesse Tefera:
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Retired elite athlete, he ran in times of 28:31 for the 10KM and 1:02:47 for the Half Marathon . He came to compete in races as important as the New York Marathon itself and has traveled the world participating in great races. Now he uses his experience to guide future generations of runners. He is in command of a small team from Addis Ababa, with whom Adawork Aberta Sadura trained and therefore with whom Sponsor an Athlete began and continues to work.
Volunteers and friends of the project:
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Apart from the most visible faces of the project, all this is only possible thanks to a multitude of people who in one way or another support us every day, and who cannot stop being mentioned:
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Jools Beardon and Jaime del Álamo were members of the team that made the documentary on Ethiopian athletics and that began to form the idea of the current project.
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Adawork Aberta Sadura, the first beneficiary of the project and now does not hesitate to help everything that her busy schedule as an elite athlete allows her.
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Álvaro Navalpotro, Rodrigo García and Alberto Acevedo, who at the beginning of 2020 traveled to Ethiopia to see the project first-hand and with their suitcases loaded with donated material.
Myriam Ostos, president of Tsehay ONGD and always ready to help with whatever is needed on the ground.
Rubén Ramiro and Carlos Freijo, always waiting from Spain to collect equipment or provide advice and assistance in high-level sports.
Tadesse Bedada, Demesse's former athlete and assistant, always at the foot of the gun, ready to help with any procedure or set the pace in training.
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Javier de la Peña and Marisol Calleja, secretary and treasurer of the association, working every day so that all the procedures go ahead.
HOW IT ALL STARTED?
In February 2018, at the initiative of Jools Beardon and Antonio de la Peña, an audiovisual project was launched to make the lives of young elite athletes visible through a documentary . It is intended to show what is the hard way to break through the elite of Ethiopian athletics and what the day to day of these athletes is like. The main objective, through this documentary, is to obtain the necessary funding and visas for one of these athletes to run in Spain, in the Madrid Half Marathon.
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I'm about to finish everything and return to Spain, the cameras and hard drives with the documentary are stolen. Even so, the project changes its focus and decides to focus on telling what happened. This new idea succeeds in getting ahead and the goal of bringing the young athlete who starred in the stolen documentary, Adawork Aberta Sadura, to run the Madrid Half Marathon is achieved.
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Since then and in a personal capacity, several friends of Adawork continued to support her with materials and services necessary for the development of elite athletics.
Adawork's hard work together with the improvements in materials and sports conditions, generate an improvement in performance, which means that today, Adawork trains with the well-known NN Running Team and has climbed to podiums of races as prestigious as the 20KM of Paris.
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After the good results of the initial idea, Sponsor an athlete arises with the intention of extending this support to more athletes with the same characteristics, as well as continuing to give visibility to these great athletes.