Las Leonas: Inside Argentina’s unseen sporting passion
Las Leonas/ Field Hockey at the 2020 Summer Olympics- Argentina (final). by Secretaría de Deportes. CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ask anyone which sport they associate with Argentina, and the answer will invariably be football. Whether your interlocutor is religious about football or simply agnostic, the fact of Argentina’s legendary status within the sport reaches deep into the cultural domain, wherever you are in the world.
For this reason, when I discovered my hockey club in Argentina, I couldn’t help but feel that this sport, with its passionate players and glowing success nonetheless resided in football’s shadow. It struck me that, despite the women’s national team placing on the podium consistently in the World Cup and Olympic Games, and sweeping the competition in all Pan American and South American tournaments, I had not previously grasped the scale of popularity that women’s field hockey has in Argentina- especially as a keen hockey player myself. When I look back on my time in Buenos Aires, rather than the FIFA World Cup with all its chants, merchandise and popularity, it was the quiet Monday and Thursday evenings I spent training for Arquitectura hockey club which were unexpectedly unforgettable. My hour-long bus ride to this small club didn’t just take me to the perimeter of the city itself (CABA), it also transported me to where I was surrounded by a different dimension of sporting passion in Argentina.
Buenos Aires boasts a total of 148 clubs (while I had only expected a dozen or so), and one of them, Club Arquitectura, welcomed me with open arms - along with a gruelling training regime. It consisted of stick and ball training (palo), endurance training, strength and conditioning, team building exercises, match footage analysis, and even meditation. All of this wouldn’t have been so surprising if this club wasn’t, as many of the girls told me when I first arrived, one of the poorer and smaller clubs in CABA, and not the best one by a long stretch either. And yet, the standard blew me away.
From my experience, in Argentina, the style of play is much more fluid than in the UK. Creativity and flair are emphasised over technical precision, and ball-hogging as we would call it seemed to be normal - encouraged, even. As a forward, I secretly relished this freedom of boundless ball-possession. Competitive spirit was in no short supply either- after one match on a weekend, I once heard one of my teammates joking that instead of arquitectura the club should be called agricultura, from the amount of times women from each team were bulldozed to the ground. I began to wonder where this huge hockey culture oozing with grit, talent and passion originated from. After all, a strong sporting tradition with such a strong female contingent is not just born out of nowhere.
I spoke to one of my old teammates from Arquitectura, who told me she believed that it was probably the success of the women’s national team that had inspired more girls to play hockey in Argentina (“ver su éxito es toda una motivación para todas las chicas que ya hacemos hockey en Argentina. En especial para las más chicas”). Although hockey was first introduced in Argentina by English immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the first women’s teams were officially formed in 1909, the watershed moment for women’s hockey in Argentina was September the 29th, 2000, when the national team won the silver medal at the Sydney Olympic Games. This was the match which earned the team their infamous epithet: Las Leonas, or the lionesses. Since then, they have been World Champions twice (2002, 2010) against the Netherlands, won 5 Olympic medals, and accumulated 10 medals at the Trophy of Champions, 8 of which are gold.
Photo of Arquitectura. Photo credit- Heather Magee.
This pride of lionesses gave rise to a whole other pride in the Argentine population, as these women became national heroes with each and every medal. The Argentinians are a notoriously proud nation in general, it has to be said, and this is due in large part to their international sporting success- something that my teammates also attested to. This orgullo is infectious. Even now, I feel an immense sense of pride in my old club, despite only being there for a short time, and not belonging to this national identity. The club in itself was a community. My teammate put it best when she said: “Es un sentimiento que no se puede explicar. Arquitectura es una familia. Te pones la camiseta para jugar un partido y sos feliz. A Arqui lo hace grande su gente”. I do not know whether she meant to indirectly quote the famous football chant, Muchachos, with its line “no te lo puedo explicar, porque no vas a entender”- but it’s the same sentiment: something an outsider wouldn’t understand, a national, communal feeling. Despite my outsider status, I was overjoyed when I saw Arquitectura’s recent Instagram post announcing that the goalkeeper from the first team, Aldana Gomis was selected to participate in training for the selection team of Las Leonas. Although she was not selected beyond the training stage, the comments underneath the celebratory post were bursting with pride, one reading: “para los que nos sentimos parte de ese pequeño gran club es una alegría enorme saber que tenemos un gran semillero. VAMOS ARQUI.”
In my short time in the club, I learnt new skills, made new friends and experienced this new side of Argentina’s sporting world, which I had not come across before. I still find it astounding that I was ignorant to just how differently the game of hockey could be played to any of my previous experience, and with such wider grassroots participation. I had not chosen to go to Argentina for my year abroad because of hockey, and yet playing it became so integral to my ‘Argentine experience’. Las Leonas will play the first women’s hockey match against the USA in this year’s Olympic Games on July 27th, a pride of lionesses hunting for the pride of their country. So, get ready to embrace a side of Argentinian sport that you never expected to.