Sport
Malaga will have three representatives at the Tokyo Paralympic Games
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Andalucía will send 18 athletes to the XVI Paralympic Games, which represents 12.8 per cent of the total of Spain's national squad for the event in Japan from 24 August to 5 September
Malaga will have three athletes from the province representing Spain at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, which will run from 24 August to 5 September.
These are the wheelchair basketball players Almudena Montiel, from Torremolinos, and Michell Navarro (who is of Mexican origin, but is a Spanish national and lives in the Axarquía) and the visually-impaired football player Antonio Jesús Martín Gaitán, better known as El Niño.
Michell Navarro / SUR
For El Niño, it will be his fourth appearance at the Games, at the age 39, after collecting a bronze medal in Athens in 2004 and London 2012, but not at Rio 2016.
In total, Andalucía will send 18 athletes to the XVI Paralympic Games, which represents 12.8 per cent of the total national squad, which consists of 141 athletes. In the recent Olympic Games in Tokyo there were 310 Spanish competitors.
The eighteen Andalusians comprise of 14 men and four women, who have an average age of 36.2 years and will perform in eight sports: wheelchair basketball, cycling, swimming, table tennis, athletics, football, rowing and triathlon. Catalonia – which has 22 representatives - and Madrid (21) are the only regions with more participants than Andalucía.
Antonio Jesús Martín Gaitán (El Niño) / SUR
