Ray Zapata, Lionel Morales and Jonas Van de Steene will be at the Olympic Games focused on winning medals
Despite not quite reaching a surface area of 900km², Lanzarote will once again be represented at the biggest multidisciplinary sporting event in the world, the Olympic Games in Paris 2024.
From 26 July to 11 August, the best athletes on the planet will be gathering in the French capital, including Lanzarote’s Ray Zapata and Lionel Morales, as well as another island resident, Belgian Jonas Van de Steene, who will compete in the Paralympics, from 28 August to 8 September, and whose preparation is concentrated in Lanzarote.
The gymnast is facing his third Olympic Games with huge objectives that include trying to reach the team final, which would be a historic feat because never before has Spain’s male artistic gymnastics team achieved it. “On an individual level I will also be fighting to make the final and of course to stand at the top of the podium“, says Ray Zapata. He also tells us that he’s working on the vault, an apparatus with which he intends to compete at a high level. “There is also an option there, you never know. If I do well, I think I could compete for a place in the vault final.”
Another Lanzarote native, the paratriathlete Lionel Morales, also previously took part in the most important sporting event on the planet, when it was held in the Brazilian capital in 2016. He made a great debut achieving seventh place and an Olympic diploma which, together with the great results he continued to see, looked like it would take him straight to Tokyo 2020.
The pandemic meant that in the end the Lanzarote native’s category wasn’t included in Japan, preventing Morales from hitting another milestone under the Lanzarote flag, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to add to his international successes. He has already been crowned on countless national and international podiums, leading the ITU World Triathlon Series ranking, always finding himself in the Top 5 in the men’s PTS2 category.
Jonas Van de Steene admits that “the feelings ahead of the Paralympics in Paris are brutal“, while he compares what is coming up in France with his last two Paralympic handbike events. “It’s going to be nothing like what I experienced in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, where for me everything was new, and I wasn’t competing at the level I am now. And it will be nothing like Tokyo because that was during COVID,” he says.
The island has been a source of inspiration for these three sportsmen who, through their effort and perseverance, have gained their place among the best athletes in the world – three figures who are proof of the sporting oxygen that is breathed in Lanzarote.