The race to succeed Argentina as Olympic football champions hots up tomorrow with the heavyweight clash between neighbours and arch-rivals, Uruguay, and hosts Great Britain in Cardiff. The charrúas will need a victory to put them a big step along the way to gold in London, having won their opening match 2-1 against the UAE in Manchester but then losing 2-0 to Senegal. Uruguay’s dream it to extend their enviable Olympic football record, which stands at two Games appearances, two gold medals!

While the hopes of British football fans will be pinned on Stuart Pearce’s men in the Olympic football tournament, they will face a stiff task from the very first round as they come up against one of the pre-tournament favourites.

Uruguayan flag kissed by the golden sun. (Photo: Mark Orton)

Pride of Paris

Uruguay became the first South American country to play outside of their own continent, let alone compete in the Olympic football tournament, when they crossed the Atlantic for the 1924 Games in Paris, making them an exotic attraction for European crowds. They qualified for the tournament by virtue of winning the 1923 South American Championship, much to the chagrin of Argentina.

Just to get to Paris the team had to beg, steal and borrow to secure their passage in third-class steerage across the Atlantic to Spain, with the prominent Uruguayan Atilio Narancio even mortgaging his house to help pay for the fare. Once there, they played a series of exhibition matches to secure board and lodgings and pay for their rail fare to Paris in second class carriages. It was during the course of these games that Uruguay served notice of their prowess by winning all nine of the matches they played.

Despite Uruguay being tournament debutants, they were far from being babes-in-the-wood, showing they could just be as streetwise as any other team. Their opening opponents Yugoslavia sent spies to watch them train, but the wily Uruguayans had cottoned on, playing as if they were the Keystone Cops, prompting the spies to report back: ‘It makes you feel very sorry, these poor boys came from so far away …’

When the time came for their first match of the Olympics, Uruguay overcame the embarrassment of seeing their flag flown upside down and a Brazilian march played in place of their national anthem, to romp home 7-0 against the Yugoslavs in front of 2,000 fans.

The Uruguay football team at the 1924 Paris Olympic Games.

As Uruguay progressed through the knockout rounds, beating the USA 3-1, and then demolishing hosts France 5-1 with four goals from Héctor Scarone, the team drew ever greater numbers of spectators. After taking on the Dutch in the semi-final and easily overcoming Switzerland 3-0 to take gold in the final, writer Henri de Montherlant, was moved to comment: ‘A revelation! Here we have real football. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a schoolboy hobby.’

In contrast to the paltry crowd that witnessed Uruguay’s opening match, the final at the Stade Colombes was watched by a packed crowd of 60,000, with thousands more locked out.

The Uruguayan team, made up of meat-packers, grocers and ice-cream salesmen amongst others, watched with enormous pride as their national banner of the sun and sky-blue and white stripes fluttered higher and prouder than the other nations, putting their country firmly on the sporting map.

With the element of surprise, their dazzling passing play made them the darlings of the French crowds, and in ‘Perucho’ Petrone they had a potent forward who topped the tournament scoring chart with eight goals.

Unused to the sight of black footballers in Europe, the presence of José Leandro Andrade in Uruguay’s midfield added to their mystique. Agile and with the capacity to deceive opponents with a swerve of his body, the French press dubbed him the ‘Black Marvel’. After the tournament he stayed in France instead of returning home with his team-mates, becoming a celebrity amongst Parisian High Society, always dressing the part in top hat and tails, and carrying a silver-handled cane – a far cry from his humble origins as a shoe-shine boy in Montevideo, where he would eventually return and die from tuberculosis in poverty and obscurity.

Amsterdam

Four years later Uruguay returned to Europe to defend their Olympic title in Amsterdam. This time they were joined by their great rioplatense rivals, Argentina, who qualified by beating Uruguay to the 1927 South American Championship.

Far from being the exotic novelty that they had been in Paris, Uruguay were now the favourites of the 18-team line-up in Holland, even allowing for the more competitive field with the Dutch playing at home, and the presence of an improved Italy and Germany.

The Uruguay Football Team in play at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games.

Before the final, the superstitious Uruguayan player Adhemar Canavessi made the supreme sacrifice by removing himself from the team on the basis that every time that he had played against Argentina for his country they had lost, and despite having played his part in getting Uruguay to the gold medal showdown, he got off the bus taking the team to the arena.

The opening game in front of a capacity 40,000 in Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium – the hottest tickets of the Games fetched more than ten times their face value on the black market – was against the hosts, and Uruguay were made to fight all the way to a 2-1 victory. Germany were no easier in the second round, winning a feisty encounter 4-1 in which two Germans and Uruguay’s skipper José Nasazzi were sent off.

In the semi-final, Uruguay won a thrilling match against Italy 3-2, with the darling of the Parisian crowds, Andrade showing his class in one last cameo performance, to set up a final against their old foes from across the River Plate.

Excitement at home was at fever pitch as people crowded the plazas of Montevideo to listen to information from the game, read out from telegraphs received at the news desks of newspapers from the Dutch capital detailing the minute-by-minute action. Interest was not confined to the River Plate alone: 250,000 ticket requests were made for the 40,000 available for the final from Europe alone.

The final was a cagey affair in which neither side attempted to seize the initiative, the game ending in a 1-1 draw. The replay was a different matter entirely as both sides went for the win and eliminate the possibility of the gold medal being determined by the drawing of lots. Uruguay freshened up their tired attack replacing Petrone, Urdinaran and Castro with Arremón, Borjas and Figueroa, and the revitalised team triumphed 2-1, the second-half winner coming from Héctor Scarone.

When Uruguay were awarded the hosting rights for the inaugural FIFA World Cup in 1930, they erected a purpose-built stadium, the Estadio Centenario (to celebrate 100 years of Uruguayan independence from Spain) and named two of the stands, the Tribuna Paris and Tribuna Amsterdam as a permanent memorial of their Olympic exploits.

Fighting Spirit

So for a population of just three million to punch above its weight on the world stage, what is the secret to Uruguay’s success?

They would put it down to la garra charrúa, the fighting spirit of Uruguay’s indigenous inhabitants the charrúas.It was most famously used to win the 1950 World Cup against massive favourites and hosts Brazil, and recently has seen Uruguay cement themselves in the top four of the world rankings – above their much bigger neighbours Argentina and Brazil.

Olympic torch in London (photo courtesy of London 2012)

London Calling

After Juan Verzeri got them through the South American qualification competition, Uruguay’s wily 65-year-old coach Oscar Tabárez, who led the seniors to the 2010 World Cup semi-final and to glory in the 2011 Copa América, has taken charge for the finals themselves.

He has a wealth of young talent at his disposal including Liverpool defender Sebastián Coates, Ajax midfielder Nicolás Lodeiro and Bologna’s Gastón Ramírez, scorer of a delightful free-kick against the Emirates.

Meanwhile, there was no shortage of senior players vying for one of the three over-age places in the squad, with both Diego Lugano and Uruguay’s most-capped player, Diego Forlán declaring their wish to be part of the team seeking to make history. In the event, both missed out as Tabárez went for Fernando Muslera – penalty saving hero against Argentina at the 2011 Copa América, and forwards Luis Suárez and Edinson Cavani.

Tabarez counsels caution, saying: “It’s easy for people to come out and say we should be going to going to the Olympics to win. They’re risking nothing by saying that. We know very well what we should be aiming for and the factors we have in our favour to achieve that.” But with this kind of pedigree, who would seriously bet against Uruguay making it a unique hat-trick of Olympic triumphs in London?

Luis Picciochi, current world champion (Photo: Melissa Riggall)

It has been six months since Argentina dominated Mundial Scrabble XIV, the 14th Spanish Scrabble world championships in San José, Costa Rica. Argentina won the Nations Cup against strong teams from Venezuela and Spain, and Luis Picciochi, an Argentine, brought home the individual championship for the second year running. You may think this leaves space for complacency, but almost immediately competition begins in preparation for the 2011 Mundial XV.

It is 3pm on a drizzly Saturday afternoon and I am taken to a large back room of a library in Caballito, a residential neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. The sight of groups of old friends greeting and catching up is not an unusual sight anywhere. But, what is out of the ordinary, is that they are surrounded by 40 delicately positioned small tables, and accompanied by three youngsters running around setting up an industrial quantity of Scrabble boards. Empty Scrabble boxes are piled neatly at the end of the room.

It is an hour until the Torneo Mensual de Junio – June’s monthly tournament – begins. Each player has three matches against similarly skilled opponents. A majority are from Buenos Aires, but some travel twice a month from as far as Rosario. After all, at stake are three places at Mundial XV to be held in Mexico City in November 2011. The players who win most matches throughout the year take the spaces.

More players arrive and the atmosphere becomes boisterous.

I find a quiet table and sit down with Luis Picciochi. Luis is the current world champion, and has been for the last two years. He tells me of his preparations for Scrabble tournaments. “For two hours every day, I practice either by playing Scrabble or studying. I study both anagrams and a dictionary containing 4,000 important words for Scrabble – I wrote the dictionary myself.”

In the Picciochi household, Scrabble is a family affair. He plays regularly with his wife and daughter and he is the first to admit he isn’t always the winner. He has played Scrabble his whole life, but professionally since 2006. “I am passionate about Scrabble. It is the challenge of anagrams, of strategy against your opponent and the calculation of possibilities.” At any point during the game he remembers exactly which tiles remain in the bag.

The winner of the first Argentine championship in 1997 was Susana Hartman, and the popularity of the game has increased ever since. There are now 120 members of the La Asociación Argentina de Scrabble (AAS), and 80 of these today fill the room and find their allocated seats for the first round of games. Players join from a variety of backgrounds – AutoCAD designers, physics professors, IT consultants. Three are also regional presidents of MENSA.

Picciochi continues: “Winning and losing are not the same to me. I am very competitive, and I always want to win.”

The competitive and serious nature of the players can appear lost amongst all the chattering going on, but it rises to the surface immediately the 40 games begin. The talking is replaced by the rattle of Scrabble tiles in bags and it is only a minute before I hear “consultar!” – already a player is challenging an opponent’s word.

Scrabble (Photo: Melissa Riggall)

‘Ranchases’, ‘Latinare’, ‘Pluameare’ – these are words I see as I walk around the tables, and, given my level of Spanish, I would challenge every single one. ‘Asaeteado’ is from the verb meaning ‘to shoot arrows at’ and ‘mazmorra’ is ‘dungeon’. Hardly words from everyday usage.

In between games, Ariel Chiapella, a competitor, tells me of another aspect of preparation, centred on the website, ReDeLetra of the Federación Internacional de Scrabble en Español (FISE), the official international body of Spanish Scrabble. “We all practice during the week on the website against each other. There are around 300,000 socios [members] playing seven million games. We play against people from Bariloche, Córdoba and Rosario in Argentina, and many others from abroad.”

To the English-speaking world, the popularity of Spanish Scrabble may appear surprising. But, given there are a similar number of Spanish and English speakers in the world, it shouldn’t be seen as odd that the Spanish world championship started only six years after the English equivalent, in 1997. And there are more competitors – this year’s tournament will see 120 take part whereas the most recent English-language competition, held in Malaysia in 2009 and won by a Thai, had 108 competitors.

Of course, the games are slightly different. Due to their rarely being used, K, both W’s and one of the two V’s are removed from the Spanish version and replaced with CH, LL, RR and Ñ. It is usual for Spanish-language games to result in higher scores.

According to Horatio Moavro, controller of the AAS, this is due to a number of factors. “Firstly, there are 700,000 words in the Spanish language, compared to just 400,000 in English. Secondly, there are more seven-letter words in Spanish, making it easier to form a Bingo.” (A ‘Bingo’, or a ‘Scrabble’, is where a player uses all seven tiles and thus scores a bonus 50 points that turn.) In addition, there are many more shorter, two- and three-letter words in Spanish. It shows in the scores – the highest today being 641.

Other players are less competitive, and are keen to tell me about the social aspect. “Its a good chance to meet all my old friends and to meet new people.” During the week are more informal matches and teaching sessions, allowing the improving players to learn from those ranked higher.

This culture of continual learning and practice by those at all levels allows Argentine Scrabble to flourish. The country continues to dominate the southern cone region. This weekend is the Austral tournament to be held in Montevideo. Of the 65 players, 40 will be from Argentina, one from Paraguay, two from Chile and the rest from Uruguay. And from this two-day tournament, two players will qualify for Mundial XV.

But, even all this training and practice is not enough when luck is not on your side. One player at the end confided: “She had better letters. It happens.”

Picciochi won all three of his games, but, as scores are aggregated with results from a meeting two weeks previously, he is ranked in sixth position. He has determined competition, and will have his work cut out to defend his title in Mexico City this November.

Photo by Rosalie Smith

Archery and drinking. It might sound like an accident waiting to happen, but it’s exactly what Jobs, a games bar in Recoleta, has to offer. In fact, there’s a great deal more to this pub than alcohol and arrows: located in a converted warehouse, with three floors of pool, table football, board games and beer, it has the atmosphere of a outsized student union. The archery is pretty special, but its best feature is that it’s somewhere where you can bring a lot of friends on a Saturday night if you want a chilled-out alternative to Buenos Aires über-trendy club scene.

It should be said though, starting a night at Jobs is slightly intimidating. As you enter, you have to show ID, walk through a metal detector and have you bag searched by a burly doorman (perhaps someone got violent with the arrows once?) However, after this slightly menacing beginning everything becomes tranqui in the extreme. You walk into a huge space, filled with pool tables, picnic-style benches, people chatting and old school rock music. When you sit down for a drink, the waiters who bring you your beer are smiley and fun, and there are four bars in total, so you never have to wait long to be served. It’s very popular, particularly after midnight, but it’s also huge, so even when there are lots of other people around, it doesn’t feel to crowded and there are always plenty of free spots.

Photo by Rosalie Smith

The selection of games on offer is impressive. There are 24 pool tables, table football, darts, Playstation 2, board games, ping pong, laser hockey and, of course, archery.  The archery is the most famous feature of the bar: ask any porteño about Jobs, and the first thing they will say to you is “arquería!” It is, according to the staff, the only bar in Buenos Aires where this is on offer, and it is a lot of fun, although increasingly difficult relative to how much you’ve drunk. My particular favourite game is the SuperMetegol or Superfoosball. This is the mother of all table football tables, the size of a single bed, with six rows of players on each side. You can play one-on-one and add an extra sporty dimension to the game as you have to dash up and down to keep up with the ball. Or you can have six players, making everything more exciting and more raucous, again relative to how much you’ve drunk.

Prices are fairly reasonable: you pay $6 for a game of pool and $15 for half an hour of any other game (this price is split between all the players). If you are very tight on cash, there are also a variety of board games that you can get for free. The games are all classics: pictionary, jenga, checkers etc. Don’t come if you’re looking for something quirky, you won’t find anything you haven’t seen before. But they’re still fun, and the best of the selection is probably the jenga, which, like the Supoerfoosball and the bar itself, is giant. With blocks the size of Hershey’s bars, it makes a very satisfying crash when it eventually falls.

Photo by Rosalie Smith

Drinks are also fairly affordable, at $12 for half a litre of beer. If you’re willing to spend more there is also a surprisingly large selection of cocktails, whiskeys and even champagne (although I find it hard to imagine the person who comes here of all places to order a bottle of Chandon) The food – chips, hamburgers, sandwiches and pizza – won’t blow you away but is tasty and filling all the same. More importantly, the kitchen is open late, so this is one of the few bars in the area where you could come and order a pizza after 2am.

If you’re coming to drink then Tuesday is the day for you, as there are two-for-one deals on a range of beverages. However, if pool is what you’re after, then come on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, when games are also two-for-one.

Altogether, this is a great place to be if you want to enjoy an evening with friends, but without the pressure of a big night clubbing. Up and running for almost 20 years, Jobs is a Buenos Aires institution. But more importantly, it’s just a really fun place to hang out.