An American in Lima

The New York Times’ Inge Sheve reports on an underdog contender for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. He’s 38-year-old Roberto Carcelen, a surfer and runner from Peru, who hopes to become the best cross-country skiier in South America, as well as his country’s first Olympic cross-country skier. (Carcelen trains in Seattle, where he lives with his [...]

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I was so absorbed by the APEC brouhaha last month I missed the news that the world’s newest superhero hails from Lima. Santiago is a viewer-created superhero character who stars in four micro-episodes in Sprint’s online series Heroes: Destiny.  More than one million people participated in the online series by selecting attributes for a male [...]

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Don’t tell this woman you just cut her team’s food allowance by 80 percent!   My favorite Peruvian weightlifter – the mighty, mighty Cristina Cornejo – returned to Peru after participating in the Beijing Summer Olympics, with hopes of helping her fellow (sister?) weightlifters achieve new heights. Now it turns out the Peruvian weightlifters can barely [...]

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Great news for fans of María Portilla, the Andean-born marathon runner who represented Peru in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games. Maria Portilla (center) runs in the Baltimore Marathon / photo by Kristine Buls/Examiner Portilla won the Baltimore Women’s Marathon this past Saturday, October 11, with a time just shy of the Peruvian national record. [...]

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A recent article in El Comercio, summarized in English by reporter Israel Ruiz, exposes why Peru performs so abysmally in international sporting events like the Olympics. Here’s Ruiz’s complete story published today in Living in Peru: Peruvian sports are trapped in time, said reporters for El Comercio, explaining there were records in the Andean country that had [...]

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Sixto Barrera carries Peru’s flag during Opening Ceremonies, Beijing Summer Olympic Games, August 2008 Peruvian wrestler Sixto Barrera, who represented his country in the Beijing Summer Olympic Games of 2008, was honored on August 26 by the United Nations, reports RPP Noticias. The wrestler was decorated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) for setting an [...]

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The Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics are officially over, the winners have scurried home with their medals, and the losing athletes are either chastised, pitied or forgotten by most of the world. No laurel wreath, no glory, the Olympic equation goes. Not on this blog, however. In the same spirit of honoring athletic excellence that inspired [...]

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Seventeen days ago I wrote a short post on “The Big Olympics and Little Peru,” about my shifting perspective, as an American expat in Lima, on the Olympic Games. I thought that one post would be it on the Olympics. Instead, as I dug for background material on Peru’s thirteen Olympians, I discovered that little [...]

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As I’m writing this post, Peru’s long-distance runner Constantino León is racing the last five kilometers of the Men’s Marathon (42.15 km), in Beijing’s National Stadium. Out of the 95 runners who began the race, only 82 remain, and León is 63rd at the 35-km mark. The first-, second- and third-place winners have just crossed [...]

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Peru’s original field of 13 Olympic contenders is now down to one athlete: marathon runner Constantino Leon. Leon will compete Saturday, August 23, starting at 6:30 p.m. (Beijing time), in the Men’s Marathon. For fans in Peru, that translates to Sunday, August 24, starting at 7:30 a.m. Thus far, no athletes representing Peru have won a medal [...]

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I’m very happy because I gave it my all, and everything went well. I am happy — very happy. The weather was good; happily I improved my time, and that’s very gratifying,” Portilla told RPP News on Sunday.

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The first week (August 10 – 16) of competition at the Beijing 2008 Olympics saw some encouraging efforts by Peruvian athletes but no medals. Here is a roundup of how Peru’s 13-member Olympic delegation has performed so far, along with buzz about the athletes from English-speaking media, bloggers and fans. (Plus blog reactions by Peru [...]

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The ultra-hip cevicheria Pescados Capitales, one of Lima’s finest seafood restaurants, plays on the Beijing Summer Olympics theme in its current “Pescados Olímpicos” (Olympic Sins) menu.

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I was feeling rather forlorn about Peru’s small Olympic delegation of 13 athletes. Then I stumbled upon Mashable’s “18 Smaller Olympic Countries to Root For.” Sean P. Aune writes: It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of the big name countries that go to the Olympics, such as the United States or Russia, but [...]

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