Ceremony in Alvalade in preparation for Rio 2016

The Artur Agostinho Auditorium in Estádio José Alvalade hosted the club's very own Olympic Committee this week, in the build up to Rio 2016. A total of 28 of the project's 38 athletes were in attendance, to receive their Olympic diplomas from president Bruno de Carvalho himself. Alvalade's Olympic success often overlooked as being Portugal's own, but Sporting's brilliance on the world athletics stage is sure to stretch long into the future.

José Manuel Constantino, head the Portuguese Olympic Committee, was at the ceremony and thanked the Alvalade president for the chance to take part. Also pleased with Vicente Moura's (Sporting's vice-president for sports) recovery from a recent illness, Constantino expressed his satisfaction with Sporting's initiative: "Having the international capacity to help athletes get ready for the Olympics makes me really happy. Athletes come and go while institutions stay, but the truth is that institutions are built by people who have not only written part of our story, but also of the entire Olympic movement."

President Bruno de Carvalho also shared his thoughts at the gathering: "There is no other club as eclectic as us and we have kept that up even while having a lot of financial problems and being so close to becoming exclusively a football club. That isn't what we are and we turned that around to bring even more sports to the club. I want everyone of them to be perfectly aware of the importance that we we give to the history of the club. This will be the 20th time we have been in the Olympics out of 24 editions of the competition."