In Argentina, a management programme to effect real change – and open minds
Fabricio Oberto played on the Argentina men’s basketball team that won basketball gold in Athens in 2004, followed by bronze in Beijing in 2008. Now? Co-founder of an esports team, he recently helped stage esports training for the Argentinian Olympic Committee’s MOSO programme, the acronym of the book on which the courses are based (Managing Olympic Sports Organisations), and which is how they refer to Olympic Solidarity’s Advanced Sports Management Courses in Argentina.
Through MOSO, Elena Iñiguez created Argentina’s first national figure skating championship. Thereafter, she drafted an operations manual. Now? She works for the International Skating Union.
Diego Martin Adrover had for years been an archery athlete. Going through MOSO, “an unbeatable and very enriching experience,” he developed a strategic plan for his sport. Now? He is President of Argentina’s Archery Federation.
MOSO — which, as its name suggests, is intended to improve management — is hardly unique to COA, the National Olympic Committee in Argentina.
But the COA offers a shining example of how MOSO can indeed work best, with hundreds of change-makers now at work in National Federations and beyond, seemingly all involved largely crediting director Silvia Dalotto-Marcó.
Her mantra: “We try to be realistic and to make real change.”
A Hall of Fame marathon swimmer, Dalotto-Marcó has since 2014 run Argentina’s MOSO programme with tough love. Each year, the programme takes in between 40 and 50 candidates; about 25 percent quit. “You have in my opinion two ways to do things,” she said. “You can really make change. Or you can say you make change. Through MOSO we do it in a very hard way. We do more than Olympic Solidarity asks us to do.”
No knock-on Olympic Solidarity, she makes clear: “The difference between MOSO and other [programmes] in sports management is that MOSO Argentina is not just a nice publication. It’s not a paper full of quotes and authors and comments. If you don’t prepare a project you can apply in reality to change management or the institution, you are out of the course. It doesn’t matter if it is a big change or a little change. It has to be change.”
The defence of each candidate’s last project: A 10-minute speaking presentation. No more. Ten minutes and one second: no. “You are to be clear in your mind,” Dalotto-Marcó said. “Coach yourself. Be clear. Don’t take too long.”
Those who make it through cannot say enough good about her, her two fellow tutors and the programme.
“Today I can find more solutions. I can think a different way, because of those tools,” said Juan Ignacio Ugliarolo, a para-surfer who went through two years ago. Now? A national physical education teacher.
“The great task of the director and her entire team in reinventing themselves to be able to carry out the course has been incredible and has also been a learning experience,” said Javier Eduardo Vijande Penas. Through MOSO, he created a licence for clubs affiliated with the national football association. He also said, “The way of approaching each case is applicable to any type of project that we can carry out.”
“They left a mark on me,” said Lautaro Moreno, “and I will be eternally grateful for the tools they gave me as a sports manager.” Moreno quit in 2017. Then he came back, finishing in 2020.
He added in perhaps the highest praise any such programme anywhere in our world can possibly receive: “They opened my mind.”