Paraguay_at_the_2016_Summer_Olympics
Paraguay at the 2016 Summer Olympics
Sporting event delegation
Paraguay competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 5 to 21 August 2016. Since the nation's official debut in 1968, Paraguayan athletes had appeared in every edition of the Summer Olympic Games, but did not attend the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow because of the nation's partial support for the US-led boycott.
Paraguay Olympic Committee (Spanish: Comité Olímpico Paraguayo) confirmed a team of 11 athletes, six men and five women, to compete in seven sports at the Games.[2] It was the nation's largest delegation sent to the Olympics without the men's football squad since 1984, and the first with a highest percentage of women in its history.
The Paraguayan roster featured five returning Olympians; two of them attended their third Games as the most experienced competitors, including table tennis player Marcelo Aguirre, and freestyle swimmer Benjamin Hockin, who represented Great Britain as a member of the relay squad on his Olympic debut in Beijing eight years earlier. Meanwhile, three other athletes competed at their maiden Olympics in London: single sculls rower Gabriela Mosqueira, Hockin's fellow swimmer Karen Riveros (women's 100 m freestyle), and tennis star Verónica Cepede Royg. World-ranked golfer Julieta Granada was selected to carry the flag for Paraguay in the opening ceremony, joining with rower Rocio Rivarola as the only females in the nation's history to accept the role.[1]
Paraguay, however, failed to earn its first Olympic medal, since the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, where the men's football team took the silver.
