If Tenerife can boast of having “hung” at least twenty-five medals during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, held last year, Arona can do so given the fact that many of them are directly related to municipal public facilities or public spaces . Specifically, more than fifteen of these protagonists were training in Arona in the months before leaving for Japan.
These are high-level athletes -at least sixteen- among whom are Marcell Jacobs, the Spanish Adriana Cerezo or the Polish relay teams and the Norwegian beach volleyball team, who chose the municipality to take the last steps towards the Tokyo competition, both for its climate and for its natural conditions, its spaces and facilities.
For all these reasons, the municipality has made its character as a large outdoor training track one of its main attractions as a tourist destination in the current edition of Fitur, which is being held this week in Madrid and which, in the case of Arona, It will be closely linked to both health security and health and healthy tourism.
The Outdoor Athletics Master Championship, in June in Arona
The main novelty for the municipality this year will be given by the celebration of the Outdoor Athletics Master Championship, an event that will take place between June 17 and 19 at the Antonio Domínguez stadium in Playa de las Américas and in which they will compete male and female athletes between 35 and 80 years old, with contests and speed and distance tests.
This event will be presented by the mayor of Arona, José Julián Mena, together with the councilors of the Sports and Tourism areas, Francisco Marichal and José Alberto Delgado, respectively, at the meeting they will hold with the media on Thursday 20 January, the main day of the municipality at the fair, at the stand of the Association of Tourist Municipalities.
This championship will bring together more than 1,500 athletes in Arona who, only in terms of accommodation, will generate daily income of more than 120,000 euros. The average stay of each one of them is five days, for which it is estimated that more than 600,000 euros of turnover in terms of the accommodation floor.
That of sports tourism, at least in the 2019 season, prior to the pandemic, left just over one and a half million euros in services and accommodation.
José Julián Mena: “Arona, leader of sports preparation”
The mayor of Arona explained today that Arona’s commitment to sports tourism “goes back many years and is directly linked to our strategy, linked to sustainability and accessible, healthy tourism in safe health conditions. It is essential -he added- that Arona continues to consolidate itself as a leader in national and international sports training and that is a commitment of this government group”.
Francisco Marichal: “A dream come true”
The councilor for the Sports area has stressed that “throughout 2022 we will bet on various events and competitions, ranging from beach volleyball tournaments on Las Vistas beach to the Las Galletas half marathon, passing the International Meeting of Combined Events or the Arona-La Escalona car climb. However, without a doubt, the great novelty is going to be this master’s championship, for which we applied to the Royal Athletics Federation and which has become a reality. It is, therefore, a transversal work with the participation of various areas”, he added.
