Tag Archives: Sports

May June 2022

Pickleball – Silly Name, Awesome Game!

April 28, 2022 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Leslie Trotter

What do you get when you combine ping-pong with tennis and throw in a wiffle ball? Pickleball, of course – the fastest growing sport in the United States and Canada, and soon to be in Huatulco as well!

While usually perceived as a “game for older people,” it really lends itself perfectly for all ages, genders and athletic abilities.

Pickleball is easy to learn. Becoming really competent is another story but almost anyone can successfully hit the ball back and forth over the net their first day. Because the court is less than half the size of a tennis court and the paddle is short and light, it doesn’t require a high level of fitness. Pickleball does, however, work hand-eye coordination, balance, agility, reflexes and at higher levels, mental preparedness. There is definitely a strategy to pickleball once one reaches the intermediate+ level.

Another great thing about pickleball is that it’s inexpensive. A starter paddle is about $40 and from a Parks and Recreation perspective, pre-existing tennis courts work well for pickleball. Many a neglected tennis court has been revived for pickleball purposes!

The one thing that continues to astound me about playing pickleball is how often you hear peals of laughter coming from the courts. While competitive players take the game very seriously, the vast majority of people simply appreciate the exercise amongst friends, where inevitably crazy shots are a thing to cheer about. Pickleball is a very social game!

So now that I’ve got you intrigued to the point of wanting to experience this for yourself, what is a Huatulqueño to do about playing pickleball? Here are the current Huatulco options:

Snowbird Pickleball
This is a well-organized group that had a humble beginning with a net and 2 sticks as posts in 2018! Fortunately, they’ve advanced since then and have introductory classes for those who want to try pickleball.
Levels: beginners to intermediate
Location: Escuela Secundaria Técnica 144, 3 covered courts; Unidad Deportiva, 4 covered courts
Season: November to March
Membership: 90
Protocol: online booking
Fee: 50 pesos per day
Contact: Colleen Gagnon – cgbike33@gmail.com

Bahias De Huatulco Pickleball
This is a drop-in group without a lot of rules other than come and play.
Levels: beginner to intermediate
Location: Unidad Deportiva, 4-6 courts
Season: year-round, typically Mon, Wed, Fri: 8-11 am
Membership: varies, ±24 in high season
Fee: 50 pesos per day
Contact: Norm Ferguson – normferg1955@icloud.com; also on FaceBook

Marina Park Pickleball
This group formed as a way for more seasoned players to hone their game. These are uncovered courts and the play can be intense but in the end, everyone clicks paddles to acknowledge the sportsmanship of pickleball.
Level: intermediate to advanced
Location: Guelaguetza Park, next to Marina Park Plaza, 2 courts
Season: year-round, typically 7-9 am daily in high season
Membership: 15 main founding members with play-priority in high season
Protocol: drop-in when numbers allow
Fee: 50 pesos per day for drop-ins
Contact: Group is basically full – you’ll probably run across “someone who knows” if you play in the places listed above.

There are other places to play pickleball, such as Las Brisas Resort and some of the newer condominium developments. These aren’t listed since they are private clubs with membership fees, although I understand that during the high season, there is a very active group at Las Brisas. Omar is the contact to find out about monthly fees and the pickleball schedule – concierge.hux@brisas.com.mx.

So take heart, pickleball fanatics and interested others! There are great options from beginner to intermediate to make your time in Huatulco full of healthy, fun pickleball games.

2022, April 2022

Swimming The Bays Of Huatulco

March 28, 2022 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Randy Jackson

Here’s a question for people familiar with Huatulco: How many of the nine bays of Huatulco can you name (without googleandolo)? I conducted a non-random, non-representative survey amongst friends and acquaintances, and came up with a range of between 2 and 7. That’s OK. I wasn’t any better at it until undertaking a fun project with my friend John this season, to swim across each of the nine bays of Huatulco. There is nothing like direct experience as a teacher, as I can now name all nine bays.

But far more important than mastering a list of names, swimming each of the bays means having an experience with the bays in a personal way. It’s like the difference between knowing the name of a particular mountain, and having climbed it. What follows is some information about each of the “official” nine Bahías de Huatulco, and a little about our experience of swimming each of them in the winter of 2022. (NB: The order of the bays is by the dates we swam them, not the geographical order).

Órgano (January 14):

For me the memory of our swim at El Órgano is the “ghost body.” I saw something in the water, floating about 5 feet below the surface. Its shape and colour, obscured by my swim goggles and the water, caused my brain to fire-up an image of a body seemingly suspended in the water. Our brains do that. They instantly form a reality influenced by subconscious expectations. On a deserted bay on the coast of Mexico there is always some unconscious trepidation about swimming out into the Pacific. And when you see something brown in the shape of a leg, calf and foot – well, it stops a fellah cold. Freud and Jung both believed that dreams had equal impact to waking experiences. I wonder if at some advanced age, years from now in a nursing home, whether my remembered reality of the swim at Órgano will come back: The image of a ghost body, or the realisation after investigating, that it was a cloud of brownish algae-like substance, surprisingly clustered in the shape of a human leg.

The walk to the trailhead for Bahía del Órgano from the Hotel Binniguenda in Santa Cruz takes about 25 minutes. Once on the forested trail, it takes an additional 10 minutes to walk to the beach. Our swim at Órgano was out to a point of rock on the right side facing the bay, then across the bay to the roped off swim/snorkel area, then back to the beach. Swim distance, approximately 500 metres (half a kilometer).

Maguey (January 21):

Back in the day before Huatulco tourism development, Bahía Maguey was enclosed by lush vegetation stretching across its mouth. People could only access the bay with a smaller boat. There is also reported to be a “secret” cave, only accessible underwater. The cave was at one time rumoured to be a hiding place for pirates. I wonder though, how did the pirates know about the cave if it was behind the reeds and under water? However, neither reeds nor diving pirates impeded our progress as we swam across the bay and back again, a swim of about 600 metres.

Also relevant to both Órgano and Maguey is a news story (March 2021) that FONATUR had purchased back these two bays from Fernando Chico Pardo (Chairman of the ASUR group). Pardo had purchased this land for development in 2011. The land is zoned for hotel and mixed commercial use, but no development had begun (and presumably no development had even been proposed). I guess the “For Sale” sign is back up on the beaches.

Chahué (January 28):

In The Edge of Enchantment: Sovereignty and Ceremony in Huatulco, Mexico, author Alicia Maria Gonzalez notes that Bahía Chahué was an alligator-infested marshland up until the FONATUR development. The sand, gravel and rock from nearby construction was used to fill the marsh and create a lovely beach with a lifeguard, public washrooms (5 pesos), and showers (10 pesos). Caution is advised at Chahué for anyone not comfortable in the water. The beach descends quickly below the water and waves crash near to shore. There are occasional rip tides. Chahué is less sheltered than other Huatulco bays so there are often modest waves. These sea swells were moderate, in fact fun, as we swam across the bay and back. The bay is about 400 metres across at the breakwater, so about an 800-metre) swim.

Cacaluta (February 4):

The original name of this bay was Cacalotepec, translated as “the hill of crows.” To get to Bahía de Cacaluta, one drives or walks 5 kilometres from the Binniguenda hotel, passing beyond Maguey, to get to the trailhead. It is then a 20-minute walk along a maintained trail. Part of the trail is along a boardwalk with two viewpoints overlooking what in February was a dried-up wetland – so dry in fact that even the grass growing where the marsh used to be has turned brown. We may need the help of Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, and the rainy season to replenish this (and other) marshlands.

Cacaluta Bay has two beaches shaped like side-by-side smiles. There is a small spit of land separating the smiles, and this point is closest to the rock island dominating the mouth of the bay. From that point, we swam across to the island, then across its rocky frontage (no beach), inside the roped-off snorkel/scuba diving area. We then closed the triangle by swimming back to our starting point, about 700 metres.

San Agustín (February 11):

It was about 10:30 in the morning as we wound our way along the gravel road (half hour drive), to access Bahía San Agustín from Highway 200. We followed a convoy of five large tourists buses on the way in. Our beach restaurant waiter at San Agustín, Cristian, thought there were about forty restaurants lining this bay. I didn’t count, but there certainly are a whole lot of them.

A central attraction at San Agustín is the coral reef located close to shore, in shallow water, and is more or less at the centre of the bay. The roped-off swimming and snorkelling area includes the coral reef and a rocky outcrop which is to the right while facing the sea. The boat access to the shore is on either side of this snorkel area.

My favourite part of Huatulco bay swimming is crossing over a coral reef. Not only for the underwater eye-candy this provides, but it also allows for a sense of movement not normally experienced in open water swimming. So even we slow swimmers feel as if we’re “ripping” when crossing over a reef. We did just that at San Agustín, but mostly we swam around the reef following the buoys along the outer edge of it, and then back, an estimated swim distance of 900 metres.

Conejos (February 18):

Some long-time visitors and residents might remember Bahía Conejos before the all-inclusive resort hotel Secrets opened in 2010. There used to be a walking trail, now fenced off, that led down to the beach and a restaurant run by local fishermen. Neither the trail nor the restaurant survived the arrival of Secrets and the subsequent fencing off of the adjacent property by the Melia Hotel chain.

Melia had announced in 2014 it would build a 500-room resort hotel on Conejos – it would have been located just east of Secrets, but as of yet, nothing but the fence and a security guard occupy the site. However, there is another trail down to Conejos west of Secrets, and two local restaurants on the beach.

Thanks to our swim quest, we rediscovered Conejos, and enjoyed the bay and beach from one of the restaurants. The trail access has a handmade sign for Conejos Bay just before arriving at the Secrets resort, about a 7 kilometre drive from Tangolunda. Conejos has the unique feature of a rock outcropping that partitions off a part of the bay. This spot is where the trail leads, and where the two restaurants are located. There is a slightly elevated, full view of the entire bay and beach access from this spot. The rock outcrop serves to screen the view of the resort leaving anyone at the restaurants with the illusion of a lovely undeveloped bay on the Oaxacan coast. In addition, while we were there for several hours, very few people from the resort ventured out onto the beach, solidifying this perspective.

Our swim was straight across from the two ends of the curved bay and back, about 650 metres in all.

Tangolunda (February 25):

Being a foreigner of the snowbird variety, with ten or more winters in Huatulco, it’s funny how much of an outsider I still felt at the resort-lined Bahía Tangolunda (“pretty woman”) bay. Yet for thousands of tourists each year, the view of this bay is likely what they take home as a memory of Huatulco. It’s a beautiful bay, in a resort-esque sort of way. The sandy curve of the bay is framed on one side by the impressive and ordered look of the reddish-orange Las Brisas hotel complex, and on the other side by mansions of Balcones de Tangolunda peeking out on the rocky cliffs.

Getting to the beach I couldn’t help feeling as if we were sneaking onto the king’s estate to poach deer. The public access is from the campground (parking 10 pesos). From here you walk along the chain-link fence of the golf course. The trail is strewn with tires and broken sand bags, placed there when the area was a bog. In February, of course, it’s bone dry. The walk is 3 or 4 minutes to the beach.

The Chontal name for this bay was tecualo, the place of rocks. We found this to be an apt description. The bay itself boasts prominent rocky islands, but there are also rocky mounds near the surface of the bay, cordoned off inside the swim areas. There are two buoy-lined swim areas, one in front of the Barcelo, the other in front of the Dreams resort. There is boat and jetski access between these two roped off areas.

We swam out and along one side of the Barcelo swim area, then further out to a point on the rocky island closest to the shore. From this rocky point we could see there was a line of rocks behind the island stretching out seaward. There is a break in the rocks about 10 metres wide, and through this break we could see the beach in front of Dreams (Camino Real Zaashila has its own cove separated by a rocky outcrop from the Dreams Resort.) We swam through this break in the rocks and across to the swim area in front of Dreams. Then back across the front of the bay to our starting point. This swim route was our longest swim in our swim-the-bays project – the full loop was about 1 kilometer.

Chachacual Bay (March 4):

Of all the nine bays of Huatulco, Bahía Chachacual takes the most effort to get to. It is accessible only by boat. We rented a lancha at San Agustín for the 20-minute boat ride to Chachacual. As you enter the bay by boat, the long playa Chachacual is on the left, stretching across most of the bay. To the right, is a separate cove known as Playa La India. This beach, often touted as a remote idyllic spot, was partially lined with beach umbrellas and tables. There was a beverage service. A lovely spot with boats anchored in the cove, shallow waters, and a nice beach, Playa La India was the end point of our cross-bay swim.

We jumped off the boat at the entrance to Chachacual bay, opposite Playa La India, where there was a small roped off snorkel or dive area along the rocks. From there we picked a large boat anchored at La India as our line of sight and began our swim. For this swim, John and I had company. John’s niece, Schuyler, an experienced open-water swimmer, joined us for the swim; John’s wife Deborah and her sister Priscilla were the boat spotter crew as we swam across the deep waters of the bay. Our swim distance at this, our final bay, was about 900 metres.

Santa Cruz:

Bahía de Santa Cruz sees the most open-water swimmers. Each morning between about 6:30 and 8:30, there are a fair number of regular swimmers. Besides the ease of access for most Huatulqueños, there are markers for the different swimming abilities. From the beach looking seaward, there are some green buoys that can be used as swim objectives. The first green buoy, referred to by the regular morning swimmers as “El Primero,” is at the end of the cruise ship pier. The distance out and back is about 700 metres. The next buoy further out is at the entrance to La Entrega (round-trip, about 1,500 metres). Most of the longer distance swimmers, if going this far, swim to the beach at Entrega. The Entrega beach is approximately 1 kilometre in each direction from the Santa Cruz beach.

John and I separately do a fitness swim at Santa Cruz each week, so we didn’t include it in “Swimming The Bays Of Huatulco” project.

In all, a fun and interesting project for John and me this season. The swim across each of the nine bays of Huatulco has enhanced our experience of Huatulco overall, and provided us with unique experiences of each of these lovely bays. There will be another swim project for us next season in Huatulco. I hope the above descriptions and swim information are useful and encourage other open-water swimmers to explore Las Bahías de Huatulco.

Randy Jackson: box95jackson@gmail.com

2022, January 2022

Learning to Surf

December 23, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Randy Redmond

The first thing I will tell you is this: you are going to hate it before you love it! (Remember these words …)

Here are the five things you need to do that help you succeed in starting your new life of surfing.

Hire a surf instructor! Too many people feel that they can learn on their own, which only leads to learning bad habits and it’ll take you twice as long to get to the point of loving the sport.
Start yourself on a soft top surfboard no shorter than 2 meters (7 feet).
Do some beach training with your board. Using your board on the sand, learn how to pop up and stand up out of the water.
Before entering the water, if your instructor has not already done so, please ask them to explain surf etiquette to you. There are rules of the road out there in the water – once you learn them you’ll avoid a lot of drama and possible injury to yourself and others.
Have patience! It’s not gonna happen in one day. Let your surf instructor push you into waves – this is not humiliating- this is how you learn. You will eventually learn how to paddle into the waves yourself.

Surfing is not only one of the healthiest sports, it’s low cost and you get to enjoy nature! Every surfer I know remembers vividly the feeling of their first blue-water wave, in other words not riding the white wash anymore. Every surfer can tell you what board they were riding, where they were surfing, how they got there and who was on the beach. Your first blue-water wave is probably the most important step to your newfound addiction. This is the feeling that you’ll be chasing and cheering for the rest of the time that you enjoy this incredible activity!

I highly recommend that you watch the many YouTube channels that will further instruct you on technique, style, and basic logic of surfing. Once you have mastered the pop-up and stand up on your board and actually catch some blue-water waves, you can graduate to a harder board. I suggest a “fun board,” yes, that’s what the board is called. A fun board will allow you to take your surfing to the next level, staying on a soft top will only keep you from excelling. From there you can gradually work your way down sizes or upsize it depending if you would like ride a short board or a classic longboard.

Huatulco Surf Company is located in the shops at Tangolunda; you can visit them to obtain a list of professional surf instructors.

2021, October 2021

Editor’s Letter

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico 2 Comments

By Jane Bauer

When I was growing up, gym class was treated as a less important subject than math or English. It was grouped in with art and woodworking (which I wish I had taken). It was a class you would skip without being worried about falling behind and many girls I know routinely came up with reasons for being excused from it. However, in the real world, skills learned in gym class are incredibly useful: it forces people to get out of their physical comfort zones, and it teaches teamwork, discipline, and communication.

On a larger scale, sports unites or separates groups, depending on whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person. The swell of stadium calls and passionate allegiances to teams have led to violent riots but also to emotional triumphs that have lifted people up and improved their lives.

One such moment is happening as I write this. With the Taliban in Afghanistan returning to power, the world watches helplessly to see how this will play out. Women will most likely be prevented from working (except as teachers and nurses), they will be restricted to women-only spaces at university and I assume limited in the subjects they are allowed to learn. You can bet they won’t be allowed to play sports where any aggressiveness might be displayed, a challenge to the meek silent demeanor the Taliban wants to force upon women. In the face of this, members of the Afghanistan women’s junior football (soccer) team and their families have fled to neighbouring Pakistan.

The international organization Football for Peace worked out the arrangements; Fawad Chaudry, Pakistan’s information minister, tweeted that the team had entered Pakistan at the Torkham border crossing and were met by a representative of the Pakistan Football Federation. The news service Reuters later published a photo taken at the PFF headquarters in Lahore of the 81 people involved – the team, their families, and their coaches; another 34 people are expected shortly.

When it comes to communities where girls and women are restricted in public life, sports can have an effective social impact. Girls who play sports tend to have higher self-esteem, continue further in education, and I would also posit that they learn to value their bodies as action-based, rather than through the sexualized lens of the media and social media.

My philosophy has always been “If you want to help a community support the education of its women.” I think I can take that one step further and include supporting its sports teams.

See you next month,

Jane

2021, October 2021

Mexico’s Olympians: Bringing Home the Bronze

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Marcia Chaiken and Jan Chaiken

The 2020 summer Olympic Games was one of the strangest in modern history. They were played in 2021 in Tokyo after a year’s delay due to the raging coronavirus, with spectators banned from the events and Japanese residents outside the venues loudly protesting the games. The demanding circumstances took their toll on many athletes; the Olympians from Mexico were not exceptions.

Mexico’s athletes seem to thrive on crowds cheering them on. The best previous Mexican Olympic performances occurred in their own Mexico City in 1964, with stands packed with their screaming fans; they reaped 9 medals, three gold, three silver and three bronze. The next best was in 1984 in Los Angeles, a city rich with people with Mexican roots cheering in Spanish; they won six medals, two gold, three silver and one bronze.

Tokyo 2020 was, for the Mexican Olympians, at best “average.” Lacking fans rooting them on, they brought home four medals, all bronze. Only one medal was in a sport that ranks high in Mexico, football, or as those north of the border say, soccer.

Soccer is more a part of life than just a game in Mexico. It’s common to see boys, still toddlers unsteady on their feet, kicking balls all over the country. Fans are fiercely loyal to their teams and the clubs supporting them.

Although Mexico has competed in soccer in just five Olympic Games, they have brought home two medals, a gold from London and the bronze this year. Perhaps the lack of spectators worked in favor of the Mexico team in Tokyo, since they faced off against the Japanese team for the bronze. If the stadium had been packed with fans from Japan, the results might have been different from the win by Mexico with a 3-0 score.

More surprising than Team Mexico’s medal in soccer was the bronze taken by Alejandra Valencia and Luis Alvarez in the mixed doubles archery competition. To bring home the bronze, the team bested first Germany, 6-2, then shut out Britain (6-0). They lost to South Korea (which has won the gold 14 times). But in their final round, competing with the team from Turkey, they scored 6–2.

Although archery is hardly a major sport in Mexico, individual archers on Team Mexico had previously won a silver medal and two bronze at the summer games. However, this was the first competition in archery involving a team of two, a man and a woman, in which Mexico medaled. Of course, archery etiquette demands silence during key competition moments. So the absence of Alejandra’s hometown rooters from Hermosillo and Luis’s from Mexicali may have aided their focus – although the fans were no doubt missed after the win.

Aremi Fuentes Zavala’s bronze medal in the women’s 76 kilogram (167 lb) weightlifting competition may help blow away the film industry stereotype of Mexican women as beautiful adornments clinging to the men in their lives. From Chiapas, a state where whole villages of women are the wage-earners and men are responsible for home and hearth, Fuentes, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall, also took the silver in women’s 76 kilo weightlifting in the 2019 Pan American games in Lima. In interviews she exudes pride in being a strong woman.

Two other women Olympians from Mexico brought home the fourth bronze medal. Their event was synchronized diving from the 10 meter platform. For Alejandra Orozco, this was her second Olympic medal in the summer sport; her teammate, Gabriela Agúndez García was competing in her first Olympics. Both women are Armed Forces athletes stationed in Guadalajara. Both began as gymnasts at very early ages, which is evident in their performance both on the platform and while airborne.

Although at age 24, Orozco is two years older than Agúndez Garcia and at 1.58 meters high (5 feet 2 inches) is 0.02 meters (1 inch) taller, during their dives they appear to be almost identical twins. From the second their toes left the platform to the second their toes, gracefully pointed to the ceiling, disappeared into the water with minimal splash, they were so coordinated it was like seeing one diver and her mirror image piking and summersaulting.

Although all these splendid Olympians missed having in-person cheering spectators, people around the world and especially in Mexico were watching them via new technologies and applauding. And when the Summer Olympics will once again be held in Los Angeles in 2028, we can hope the cheering in Spanish will once again spur the Olympians from Mexico to more medals – perhaps even bringing home the gold.

2021, October 2021

A “Trashy” Olympic Scandal

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Kary Vannice

A pile of garbage bags sparked a very interesting (and very embarrassing) controversy for team Mexico at this year’s Olympics – a controversy that raised the question, are the Olympics really about patriotism and national pride or just another chance for athletes to compete and win worldwide fame?

How did something as mundane as a sack of trash lead to such a provocative question and spark a global debate? Well, to be fair, it was the contents of the bags that made headlines.

On July 29th, a female Mexican Olympic boxer posted a photo on her social media showing several sacks of trash thrown out by the Mexican softball team. The bags contained official Mexican Olympic team uniforms and training gear.

Along with the photo, she posted this quote:

“This uniform represents years of effort, sacrifice, and tears. All Mexican athletes yearn to wear it with dignity, and today the Mexican softball team sadly left it all in the garbage of the Olympic villages.”

This act of disrespect was made much worse because 14 of the 15 women competing for the Mexican Olympic softball team were born in the United States.

In fact, Mexico qualified for its first-ever Olympic softball appearance by recruiting American collegiate athletes of Mexican descent, a practice that is totally legal according to the International Olympic Committee, which requires that athletes be citizens or nationals of the country they compete for. Athletes with dual or multiple citizenship can choose which country they want to represent and declare a transfer of allegiance specifically and only for the Olympic games. When the games are over, they can go right back to competing professionally or collegiately in their home country.

Because each of the 200 countries that participated in the Tokyo Games has its own laws governing citizenship and residency, countries wanting a better chance at an Olympic medal can easily bend the rules by actively seeking athletes from other countries who have ancestral ties to the country.

The United States, which has more professional athletes than any other country, is a prime hunting ground for Olympic athletic talent. Only the best of the best qualify to compete on the US Olympic team, but many who don’t make the cut easily qualify to join the team of another country, where the talent pool isn’t so deep or over-crowded.

And that’s exactly what happened in the case of Mexico’s 2020 Olympic softball team, with all but one being born in the United States. This led one news outlet to publish an article titled “Mexico’s Olympic softball team is made in the USA.”

But what are the consequences of stacking a potentially winning team with players who are in it solely to compete and not to “bring home the gold”? How would the Mexican people have felt had the softball team won gold? Would they feel a sense of national pride knowing that 14 out of the 15 metals would go home to the United States and never touch down on Mexican soil? It’s very unlikely.

It also seems quite clear that the women themselves felt more allegiance to the Olympics than to Mexico, eventually admitting that they threw out the team jerseys given them by the Mexican Olympic Committee to make room for bed comforters and quilts from their rooms at Olympic Village. Essentially, they favored souvenirs with six colored rings on them over the uniforms that sported the Mexican flag.

In an official statement (after becoming an international sports scandal), a representative of the softball team said that it was simply a matter of “too much cargo.” Yet ESPN Mexico reported that sets of softball equipment, clothing from the opening ceremony, sneakers, and suitcases were also found in the garbage, begging the question, what’s it worth to represent a country that’s not your own in the greatest sports games on the planet? As it turns out, for some, not even the price of overweight luggage.

But to be fair, Mexico isn’t the only country taking advantage of the transfer of allegiance rule. In the last Olympics, nearly 200 athletes competed for countries they were not born in. Two athletes have even won medals for two different countries in the history of the games!

Each individual must, for themselves, weigh the balance of national pride vs. the chance to compete at all costs. But it’s a powerful statement that in 2016 the Olympic Committee formed the Refugee Olympic Team so that athletes who have been forcibly displaced from their home countries could still compete.

In this year’s Olympics, 29 athletes from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Congo, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela competed for the Refugee Olympic Team in 12 events. They entered the Tokyo Olympic stadium under a united flag that represents refugees around the world, all 29 of them proving it’s not the flag you stand under, but solidarity that matters most.

2021, October 2021

World Surf League Visits Mexico for the 2020-21 Championship Tour

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Julie Etra

We all know about the pipeline at Playa Zicatela in Puerto Escondido, and some of the surf spots just to the east of Huatulco, including La Bocana and Playa El Mojon. A bit farther east is Barra de la Cruz, known almost as much for its wildlife conservation activities as for its surfing.

The 2020-21 Tour (2020 canceled for COVID-19)

In August of this year, Barra de la Cruz hosted the Corona Open Mexico tournament, part of the World Surf League (WSL) Championship Tour. The Corona Open is an international competition, featuring professional surfers from France, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Italy, and the United States, all being countries with good surf. The World Surf League, the governing body of professional surfers, started out in the 1960s, going through multiple organizational and name changes until it became the WSL in 2015, when it was acquired by an investor group with surfing and media interests. The majority backer is the American billionaire Dirk Ziff, an indication that surfing has now become serious and profitable business. The fact that surfing made the Tokyo Olympics this year doesn’t hurt!

Competition in Barra is completely different from what goes on in Puerto Escondido, famous for its huge waves that attract thrill-seeking adrenaline surf junkies. I am told this by my daughter-in-law Joycelyn Turk (aka Joy), who knows much more about surfing than I do. Joy is a “Tica,” living in Costa Rica as a professional chef and avid surfer, and has surfed, up close and in person, Zicatela, Mojon, and Barra. Barra has a “point break” wave, where the wave comes off a headland or point, while the famous Playa Zicatela is a “beach break” that forms huge waves off the ocean floor.

The WSL competition is very intense and difficult to manage due to tournament protocols and the unpredictability of both the surf and the surfers. This is the first year that competitors overlap during heats, with two paddling out about five minutes before the two previous surfers are still in competition. The competitors paddling out must give priority to the pair in the final minutes of their heat, meaning the second pair has to give way to any wave either of the previous competitors has taken.

The championships at Barra de la Cruz were swept by the Australians. For the men’s tourney, Jack Robinson approached Barra ‘”correctly,” by sitting in the critical position outside the farthest rock, where the wave can be bigger and starts off with a “dredging barrel.” For the women’s tournament, seven-time women’s world champion Stephanie Gilmore narrowly won against Hawaii’s Malia Manuel.

Winning the WSL Championship

In 2021, the WSL is offering each of the winners (one man, one woman) of the entire tour a prize of $100,000. In addition the WSL has a prize pool of over $1 million, which is divided by competitive ranking among all competitors during each event.

The finals of this year’s WSL tour took place September 9-17 at Lower Trestles Beach in San Clemente, California; the men’s competition was won by Gabriel Medina of Brazil, who took fifth place in Barra, while American Carissa Moore, also fifth in Barra, took the women’s title.

According to the WSL, judging is on a scale of 1-10. The surfer’s performance on each wave is scored by five judges on five characteristics: difficulty; speed, power, and flow; and different assessments of the surfer’s maneuvers. The highest and lowest scores are dropped, and the three remaining scores are averaged. Then the two highest-scoring performances combine to become the surfer’s “heat total.”

The competition begins with 100 participants, male and female; occasional vacancies are filled with “wild card” competitors, which is how Huatulqueñan Regi (Regina Perez Paoli) was able to compete this year (more about Regi: https://www.montecito.mx/razones/surfing-huatulco – her scores were not available when this was written).

Why Did the Tour Come to Barra de la Cruz?
So, the next obvious question is WHY BARRA? The break, of course, the infrastructure to support the event and its large staffing and entourage, and – very important – COVID-19. Other potential host countries had less friendly protocols during the pandemic, with tourism and foreign arrivals curtailed or prohibited, although Joy and I viewed websites shouting RED status for COVID-19 in Huatulco, “LEY SECA!” (limits on alcohol sales), “50% occupancy!”

Interview with a Surfer
Naturally, to further my education on surfing, I took advantage of Joy’s visit to interview her on the topic.

How long have you been surfing? 22 years. It’s wild. All because of my friend Neal McCombs. We met in Carlsbad, California, where he and his family taught me how to surf. North County San Diego has a lot to offer surf-wise – something for everyone. I grew up in Tahoe so it was a natural transition from snowboarding to surfing, but still it took years to actually understand and be decent in the sport. I moved to New York City to work in Michelin kitchens and become a professional chef. While I was there, I was surfing at Rockaway in the city and out on Long Island in Montauk, before The Surf Lodge [a Montauk hotel/restaurant] opened, before it was as trendy as it is now. That’s also where I met another close friend, Danny DiMauro, who heavily influenced my surfing style.

Where is your favorite surf spot? That’s a hard question to answer. I have to say overall, five minutes from my house [in Costa Rica] is the break I’m at every day, all my friends are there, and the vibe is great (most of the time) and it’s always different. Some days it’s big and nasty, some days it’s small and playful, and almost every day it’s head-high for me because I’m short. Pavones would be a close second in Costa Rica because it is only a day of driving to get there and the second-longest left-hand wave in the world.

Tell me about Barra de la Cruz. Depending on the day, it can be very technical, starts off fast, and if it’s the right swell direction there’s potential to get some pretty serious barrel action both on the outside and on the inside of the wave. It can also be scary if there are large swells with overhead and double overhead waves. The current gets really strong during those moments and it’s hard to stay in position. And you have to get behind the rock and avoid falling into the rocks. If you are more to the inside of the rock, the takeoff is easier but that doesn’t mean it’s not intense.

The locals can be pretty territorial. which is normal for surfers, particularly in Mexico, which is completely understandable and ok, as long as you are respectful and give a friendly hello. It is a little different for women, we can get away with a little more, but we really have to prove ourselves. And we sometimes have to fight a little harder to get a good wave if there are a lot of people in the lineup. It has been my experience that, all too often, men will assume you can’t handle certain waves or that women can’t surf as well as men. So, you had better go when it’s your turn or you will forever be at the back of the line.

And other surf spots along the coast? Mojon is a gem. There are a lot of these gems along the coast. I cannot stress enough how important it is to speak Spanish or at least try. It goes a long way with the locals both in the water and on land. Also, really important, if you want to surf the more remote beaches, hire a guide. That will take you to hidden spots, get you some great waves and feed the local economy that depends on surf tourism. I have heard that Lalo with Surf Tours Salina Cruz is excellent.

I know this article is about Mexico and the competition, but where else have you surfed?
Most of Central America with the exception of Honduras because there’s not a whole lot of surf there.

Drew (my media naranja) and I met in Las Manzanas, Nicaragua, located on the Emerald Coast of the Pacific 45 minutes northwest of Chinandega. There’s lots of remote surfing up there, but none of the breaks really had names then. I was shocked to see another person in the surf and in true surfer fashion we thought the same thing at the same time “Who the f*** are you?”

El Tunco and Las Flores in El Salvador. The setup in Las Flores is very similar to Barra De la Cruz.

Bocas Del Toro, Panama, goes off during wet season and has a well-known big wave break called Silverbacks, and then lots of other breaks off the various islands that you can only get to by boat taxi.

Chile has Chicama and Los Lobos. both epic world-famous lefts, Chicama being the longest left in the world (makes goofy footers happy) at 2.2 kilometers from start to finish.

And then there’s Indonesia and the Maldives and South Africa. So many waves, so little time.

To see almost an hour’s worth of the WSL tournament in Barra de la Cruz, check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJOKVxFHo8Y.

2021, October 2021

Mexico City Olympics – 1968

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Randy Jackson

There are two iconic, yet paradoxical, images from the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. One is of the torch runner, Enriqueta Basilio Sotelo, running up the stairs of the Olympic Stadium, amid the crowd and photographers, to light the Olympic Cauldron. Enriqueta was the first woman in Olympic history to light the Olympic Cauldron. It is an image of modernity, of hope, and of progress for Mexico and for the world. In the other iconic photo, two African American athletes stand on the medal podium, each holding up a black-gloved fist, shoeless but wearing black socks, with their heads bowed. This image of defiance and protest is emblematic of events in that tumultuous year, 1968.

Mexico won the bid to host the 1968 Olympics over three competing countries: the United States, France, and Argentina. For decades after the Second World War, Mexico had enjoyed what historians now call “The Mexican Miracle.” This was a golden age of capitalism in Mexico. It was a period of strong economic growth, with increases in industrial production, worker wages, and growth in the middle class. It was also a sustained period of internal stability under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). In the 1960s the PRI saw the next step in the economic progress for Mexico was to increase its international profile for investment and tourism. Hosting the Olympics in 1968 was seen as an important way to do this.

The PRI and its president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964 – 70), had grown confident in its own power and the social stability it afforded Mexico. The anti-establishment protests rife in the world leading up to 1968 had not been seen in Mexico. However, that social stability was the result of iron-fisted control over almost all aspects of society, including the state-owned media. It wasn’t that discontent didn’t exist, rather it was repressed.

By 1968, particularly in Mexico City, there was a large and growing middle class who were unhappy with the substantial expenditures on Olympic facilities. This discontent piled onto the resentment directed towards President Ordaz after his heavy handed repression of a doctor’s strike. As the Olympics approached, some student protests began over school-specific issues. These protests were miniscule compared to the student uprisings in France, Germany, and the United States at the time. But President Ordaz repressed the protests with a heavy hand, not wanting any unrest that might disrupt the Olympics.

This resulted in larger and more frequent student protests. As the opening date of the Olympics approached, a student protest was organized to take place on October 2, ten days before the Olympics were to begin. The location was the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Mexico City neighbourhood of Tlatelolco (a former Aztec city state). By 5:00 PM that day a crowd of about 10,000 people had gathered in the square to listen to speeches by student leaders. Around 6:00 PM military helicopters dropped flares over the crowd. There followed some initial shots fired from uncertain origins. This gunfire resulted in some army and police officers firing into the crowd.

Eye witnesses later reported piles of bodies in the square, of hundreds injured, and thousands of people detained. However, the official account, carried by the state-controlled media, said only four people were killed. This event came to be known as the Tlatelolco Massacre. There were no further student protests after that, and the Games of the XIX Olympiad opened as planned on October 12, 1968.

A full account of the October 2nd massacre at Tlatelolco only began to emerge after 2000, when the PRI party was defeated by the PAN (National Action Party), under the presidency of Vicente Fox. President Fox ordered the declassification of military documents related to the October 1968 events. What emerged was the information that personnel from a special military branch had opened fire from nearby apartments on both the police and the crowd. They did this to provoke a response from the army. The crowd panicked and fled while the army responded with force. Killings, beatings, and arrests continued through the night. Power and phone lines were cut to the neighbourhood; 3,000 people were detained and all the student leaders were arrested.

But in October 1968, all that was unknown to most of the world and to the vast majority of people in Mexico. Ten days after the Tlatelolco massacre, Enriqueta Basilio, dressed in white athletic gear, ran up the steep white steps of the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City. Smoke trailed the torch in her raised right arm as Enriqueta sprinted the stairs on that calm clear autumn day. Enriqueta, a national champion in athletics, lit the Olympic cauldron, hundreds of white doves were released, the stadium crowd cheered, and the games began.

The 1968 Olympics had more Mexican athletes entered (275) and Mexico won more total medals (9) than in any previous or subsequent Olympics Games. Mexico won three gold medals (two in men’s boxing, one in men’s swimming): three silver medals (men’s speed walking, women’s fencing, and women’s diving); and three bronze medals (two in men’s boxing, one in women’s freestyle swimming).

At these Olympics, a number of world records were set. American Richard Fosbury introduced a new method for the high jump, a backwards flop that won him the world record and a gold medal. His technique, now known as the Fosbury Flop, has been used by all high jumpers since. In the men’s 100-meter dash, American James Hines was the first person in history to break the 10-second barrier. Another world record was set in the men’s 200-meter race by American Tommie Smith, at 19.83 seconds. But it wasn’t that world record, or his gold medal, that made Tommie Smith instantly famous, it was what happened at the awards ceremony on the morning of October 16, 1968.

In a dramatic race, Tommie Smith held a commanding lead early on. That lead narrowed as they approached the finish. John Carlos, Smith’s American team-mate, had moved clearly into second place. Then suddenly, from the athletes further back, the Australian Peter Norman surged forward with phenomenal speed and passed John Carlos 4/100 of a second faster at the finish line. Tommie Smith had earned gold, Peter Norman silver, and John Carlos Bronze.

These three athletes approached the podium displaying numerous symbols. Smith and Carlos were shoeless to bring attention to black poverty in the US; Carlos had his shirt undone as a symbol supporting the working class; and all three athletes wore badges for the Olympic Project for Human Rights (a US organization to protest racial segregation in sports). But none of these symbols had the visual impact of Smith and Carlos who, during the US national anthem, bowed their heads and raised a black gloved fist in the air.

To their credit, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) refused the demand by the American IOC president to strip Smith and Carlos of their medals. But they were kicked off the American Olympic team and expelled from the Olympic Village. They returned home to condemnation by the American press and even death threats. Peter Norman returned to derision and ridicule in Australia for supporting his fellow champions. He was denied all future Olympic entry, despite qualifying.

This iconic image became bigger than any of the athletes on the podium could ever have imagined. Beyond their own life-long consequences from this action, the image came to represent, for the whole world, that tumultuous year – 1968.

As for the torch bearer Enriqueta Basilio, she later became a deputy in the Mexican Congress and a permanent member of the Mexican Olympic Committee. In October 2020, a year after her death, Enriqueta became the first Olympic athlete ever to have a celestial body named after her – Queta is a moon of the Trojan asteroid. Perhaps, of these two Iconic images, it will be Enriqueta’s that stands in the long run to represent the image of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

2021, October 2021

Play Ball! Play Mesoamerican Ball! Play Ulama!

September 25, 2021 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Deborah Van Hoewyk

It’s Mexico’s oldest sport, played formally with rules, courts, and rituals for at least 3,000 years, and informally for a millennium or more before that – it’s also the world’s oldest team sport. While the folks of the “Initial” and “Early Formative” periods in Mesoamerican culture (1900-1000 BCE) played all kinds of ballgames, with all kinds of balls, when we say “Mesoamerican Ball,” we’re talking about a sport that is thought to have originated in the lowlands of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador, probably because that’s where the rubber for the rubber ball was most common.

Mesoamerican ball (ōllamalīztli, ōllama in Nahuatl, pitz in Classic period Maya) is a fundamental feature of pre-Columbian culture in the region – archaeologists have identified nearly 2,500 ball courts (tlachti in Nahuatl), with the oldest known court (originally thought to be from about 1400 BCE, but recently redated to 1650 BCE) in Paso de la Amada in the coastal lowlands of Chiapas.

The oldest court in the Mesoamerican highlands dates from 1374 BCE, and was just found in 2020, under another ballcourt in San Mateo Etlatongo by Jeffrey P. Blomster and Victor E. Salazar Chávez, archaeologists from George Washington University. (Etlatongo is 90 km (54 miles) northwest of Oaxaca City, off Routes 190 and 135D.)

Of course, discovering the second oldest Mexican ball court in the Oaxacan highlands has upended the idea that the game came from the lowlands, so the academics are in a bit of a tizzy right now. We, however, are happy that the discovery tells us more about the sport itself.

How to Play (Really Ancient) Ball!

That ballgame was there at the creation, so to speak, as part of the origin myths of the Mayan people recorded in the Popol Vuh, an ancient sacred text of the Maya. The version we have was prepared from oral recitations of the story, first (most probably) as a phonetic rendition by a Spanish scribe in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, sometime after 1524, when the area was conquered Pedro de Alvarado. No one’s ever found any such manuscript, but we do know that the priest Francisco Ximénez, who served in Santo Tomás Chichicastenango (or Chullá or Chilá), prepared a manuscript of “the histories of the origin of the Indians of this province of Guatemala.” It was “translated from the Quiché language into Castilian for the convenience of the ministers of the holy gospel.” The Ximénez document, produced between 1701 and 1703, put the phonetic version on the left and Spanish on the right. Given the Spanish penchant for destroying indigenous documents and artifacts, it is a remarkable contribution to what we know of ancient Mayan thought.

And what does the Popol Vuh have to say about the ballgame? Not all that much about the rules, although it implies sacred, political, and ritual components of the game.

Hun Hunahpu and his brother Vucub Hunahpu are playing ball on a court set up by the lords of the underworld, Xibalba. The noise of the brothers’ game annoys the lords; when the brothers fall asleep, the Xibalba lords capture them, kill them, and bury them in the ball court. All except Hun Hunahpu’s head, which they hang in a fruit tree. Along comes a goddess, and Hun’s head spits into her hands; she becomes pregnant and bears his sons, the Hero Twins, who through a series of adventures, end up in a ballgame with the lords of Xibalba; the Twins win.

The myth links the ballgame with overcoming death, with heroic mortals overcoming underworld deities on a field that links death with life, thus creating the universe in which we mortals live in.

As for how the game was, is, and would be played in our time, the Popol Vuh doesn’t really tell us. What we do know is that it was played in different ways in different places; our information comes from the balls themselves, of various sizes; excavated ball courts, with bouncing walls (rather like handball) or rings mounted high on the wall (rather like basketball); paintings of ball games, even in places where no ball courts have been found; remnants of pottery figurines of ballplayers showing the player wearing a protective yoke, with a loincloth below (confirmation that the hip-ball version, rather than hand- or foot- or stick-ball, was predominant); human vertebrae (confirmation of the notion that losing a ball game could be fatal).

The games were played sometimes one on one, or in teams of up to four players. In places with no upper goal rings, the point is to keep the ball in play. Scoring is very complicated – when one team allowed the ball to go out of bounds, the other team scored. If a player let the ball bounce twice before returning it to the other team, a penalty. With goal rings, some think a failed attempt penalized the team that tried, when the ball actually went through the ring, the game was over. Others think the goal ring, which was a difficult target for a hip-shot ball, was just for bonus points.

As for the human sacrifices, certainly foreshadowed in the Popol Vuh, sometimes yes, mostly no. There’s evidence that the upper classes played the game, so sacrifice was out. As the ballgame moved from the Maya to the Aztecs, however, issues of war and prisoners of war became more prominent, and sacrifice was in. There is evidence of human sacrifice at the huge Zapotec ballcourt at Monte Albán, but doubt as to whether it was the winners or losers who were sacrificed. At Chichen Itza, home to skull racks and unconfirmed rumors that the game was played with severed heads, it’s definitely the winning team that gets done in.

About That Ball …

We don’t know much about the size or weight of the balls used in play, although the ball is responsible for the “lowland paradigm” among archeologists, i.e., that because the Panama rubber tree (Castilla elastica) grows along the coast, the game developed there. And wrapping around the rubber tree was the white moonflower (Ipomea alba), a night-blooming morning glory. Combining the sap of these two plants created a particularly bouncy rubber, which fascinated the Spanish conquistadors – rubber was virtually unknown in Europe at the time.

It may have been the ball more than the game that led Hernan Cortés to take a team of indigenous players back to Spain in 1528, seven years after the Conquest, when he went to plead his case for continuing to rule Mexico (even some of the Spanish found the destruction of the Aztec Empire unnecessarily brutal). While Cortés brought many “wonders” back to the Spanish court, the ballgame – especially the bouncing rubber ball – was apparently a big hit. Columbus might also have brought rubber balls back to the Spanish court, but not accompanied by teams of barely clad but completely literate, extremely athletic players – we even have a 1528 drawing of them at play!

Although the clergy present supposedly muttered about human skulls in the core of the ball, two representatives from the Nahua teams (we know one was Benyto Maçatlaquemi – the scanty records do not name the second) went off to visit Pope Clement VII. They had learned both Spanish and Latin, as well as Court and Vatican etiquette – Cortés presented them as gentlemen scholar athletes, in their finest indigenous clothing, dyed scarlet with cochineal, iridescent with quetzal feathers. Clement bounced the ball, and cardinals laughed. Clement bestowed on the Nahuas the usual Vatican gifts, e.g., Italian clothing, but he also gave each of them a gold chain, a mark of rank and status, made by the most noted goldsmith in 16th-century Rome, Pompeo de’ Capitaneis. Clement prepared four papal bulls in the wake of the ballplayers’ visit: he established churches for indigenous peoples in Mexico City, in Culhuacán and Tlatelolco, now parts of Mexico City, and in the neighboring state of Tlaxcala.

The Vatican’s goals were to teach indigenous peoples how to read and write Spanish, to preserve indigenous languages in the Roman alphabet, and to encourage indigenous peoples to write their own histories. These goals were undertaken by the Jesuit priests of New Spain; their efforts are generally credited with the creation of Latin American humanities. It should be noted that the influence went both ways – crimson-dyed clothing and featherwork became very popular across Europe.

Play Ulama!

Mesoamerican ball is still played in a number of Latin American countries, both at home and against each other. An exhibition game was played at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City (see article elsewhere in this issue).

Now called “pok ta pok,” after a 1932 adaptation by a Danish archaeologist from a Yucatecan word, as often as “ulama,” the sport’s last World Cup (the third) was won by the Black Jaguars of Belize, beating out El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras. The Mayan Ball Game World Cup is held every two years – if COVID allows, the fourth World Cup is coming right up in Mérida, in the Yucatán, December 2-6, 2021.

At the Xcaret eco-archaeological park, there’s an ulama court where exhibition games are played. Mexico City has an ulama court where amateurs form up teams to play matches. And Mexico’s Secretariat of Culture has been urged by other government agencies to “formulate, establish, or evaluate the candidacy of the ulama tradition that comes down from the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican ball game, practiced in some Sinaloa communities,” to be considered for UNESCO’s designation as an intangible cultural heritage.

2013, March 2013

Las Poderosas

March 1, 2013 The Eye Mexico Leave a comment

By Julie Etra and Jane Bauer

Maria Asuncion  Arumburuzabala is the wealthiest  woman in Mexico. She is the granddaughter of Don Felix  Arumburuzabala, founder of  Grupo Modelo, the brewing company that produces Corona  which is distributed in more than  180 countries worldwide. She is  considered one of the most  influential Mexican women in the  economic sector, serves on the  Boards of several Mexican  corporations, and also has a stake in Grupo Televisa. She was the  first woman to serve on the  Mexican Stock Exchange (2003-2006) and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the German company Siemens, Mexican division (2003 to 2006). Continue reading Las Poderosas →

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