Portugal came home from Taranto with 32 medals, 16 of them gold
The Mediterranean Games ended with Portugal eighth in the table and a national record — 16 gold, seven silver, nine bronze from a squad of 172. The total is the smaller half of the story.
Portugal finished the Taranto Mediterranean Games with 32 medals — 16 gold, seven silver, nine bronze — and eighth place in the table. In three appearances at these Games, the country has never done better.
The figure that travelled was 32. It is the least interesting of the three.
The colour is what changed
Tarragona 2018 produced 24 medals. Oran 2022 produced 25. Seven more in four years is quiet progress, and if that were the whole story the line would be close to flat.
Half of these 32 are gold. Sixteen finals won, at a Games that includes Italy, France, Spain, Turkey and Greece. A team that reaches a lot of podiums is well prepared. A team that wins half of them is good on the days it cannot afford to be anything else, which is a harder thing to be.
Who actually went
Portugal sent 172 athletes to Italy across 30 sports. Ninety-nine were women and 73 were men, so the Portuguese Olympic Committee squad was majority female — and in a record built mostly out of finals won, that is not a decorative detail.
Taranto drew 3,854 athletes from 26 Mediterranean countries between 21 August and 3 September. It was the first time the Puglian city had hosted the event.
Some of it we covered as it happened, including Ana Brito’s gold in the K1 500, when the count still stood at five. We wrote then that the sports still to come would settle the total. They settled it: it more than tripled.
The next edition lands in 2030, and the question worth asking then is not whether Portugal clears 32. It is whether it wins half of what it contests again.
By Vasco Almada
Chart: Tugadaily, with IPDJ data
