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Asked if the Cielo effect was tapped into after he won the gold in 2008, the athlete sees a ‘worsening.’ “In number of athletes, we’re going backward. If you take the number of federated from 10 years ago, I can’t say for certain, but if it increased I doubt it was significantly. And this for a sport in which we’ve been winning medals every year since 2008. The structural part only got worse. What got better was the [national team] group. Everyone grew together; it’s a great team. The technical part and the ability of the athletes evolved a lot, but the structure”

Image courtesy of Nicholas Bittencourt, CC BY-SA 2.0