The Faculty of Sports of UCAM Universidad Católica de Murcia recently received a great news with the certificate issued by the International Olympic Committee for its Centre of Olympic Studies. This ‘quality seal’, awarded by the IOC, places UCAM in the elite of this kind of institutions, since among the 42 centres that are present in Spain, only seven obtained such certificate, and only 46 centres around the world have it. In the Region of Murcia, it is the only one that has reached this category. 

Antonio Sánchez Pato, dean of the Faculty of Sports of UCAM and director of the Centre of Olympic Studies, explains that “with this certificate, the IOC is saying that we are working in the right direction and that UCAM is a university of reference with regard to sports, since the University Centre of Olympic Studies and Research has three areas of work: research, training and management. To highlight these three aspects, is it necessary to have a Faculty of Sports with a high teaching and research level, a Service of Sports Activities that brings Olympic athletes to our classrooms and a president who loves and values sports”.

To obtain this distinction from the IOC, whose criteria have been reinforced to make it more selective, the Faculty of Sports of UCAM has been working intensively for years on several fronts: “Mainly university training with regard to sports, with the subject of Training in Values and Olympism that we teach in the fourth year and many researches on Olympism, from more theoretical works to empiric researches on COVID and dual career. To this we must add the participation in congresses and conferences at a national and international level and activities of dissemination of the Olympic values and principles in schools, in the university itself or in the entire world through free ‘online’ conferences, without forgetting the publication of books and chapters on Olympism, doping, dual career and other related topics”.  

However, our work does not end there; Sánchez Pato is already establishing new challenges for the years to come: “We want to launch a webpage that highlights the activities carried out and our publications. Our final aim is for UCAM to be as known for its research and academic activity as it is by virtue of the results of its teams and athletes”.