Iberdrola España presents the 6th edition of the Iberdrola Supera Awards in Toledo, with a prize pool of €300,000

Iberdrola España has today presented the 6th Iberdrola Supera Awards, at a ceremony held at the Parador de Toledo, with which it seeks to highlight projects and initiatives that represent and promote women's sport and drive equality through sport.

As in previous years, the awards will be divided into six categories, each worth €50k euros:

• Supera Base, which rewards initiatives that promote youth sport among girls under 16.
• Supera Competition, which distinguishes those actions that help get women (over 16) into competing.
• Supera Social, which recognises actions that promote the integration of at-risk women through sport.
• Supera Inclusion, which highlights exemplary projects for the practice of sports by people with disabilities. 
• Supera Communication, which honours actions that convey the importance of the role of women in sport and communicate the achievements of our female athletes.
• Supera Rural, which rewards initiatives that promote the practice of sports by girls or women in municipalities with less than 5,000 inhabitants.

The deadline for submitting applications opened on 24 April and will close on 27 June. After that, each of the projects will be studied closely by a blue-ribbon jury made up of leading athletes and media personalities, such as Sandra Sánchez, Carolina Marín, Alexia Putellas, Paloma del Río and Manu Carreño. 

The event held today in the capital of Castilla-La Mancha was attended by Sandra Sánchez; Loida Zabala, a member of the Iberdrola Ambassadors programme; and the company’s Head of Sponsorship, Laura Gil.
 

The karateka, a native of Talavera de la Reina, stressed in her speech that ‘behind these awards are the dreams of many projects and people, and that through this recognition both the present and the future of an entire generation can be transformed’. Sandra Sánchez emphasised with her usual smile and down-to-earth attitude the ‘responsibility’ she felt this year on the jury to choose the winners well and to ‘give real opportunities to those who can benefit from this initiative, assuming the responsibility of contributing to social change’.

The weightlifter, who won the Iberdrola Supera Inclusion Award in the first edition, in 2020, for her project 'Much to do', said that  ‘we had an incredible experience and we were able to train a ton of people who had just been diagnosed with this disability. The Iberdrola Supera Awards made it possible for us to fill ourselves with dreams, dreams that today have come true for people who are Spanish champions in our sport’. ‘They helped me a lot to set up the Loida Zavala Foundation and offer people who had just acquired a disability the opportunity to discover adapted sport as a tool for self-improvement, motivation and personal development’. 

With ‘Much to do', Loida Zabala sought to create a multi-purpose room with sports equipment at the Paraplegics Hospital in Toledo so that those admitted could take up weightlifting and find refuge in sport during their time there. The project has been transferred to two gyms: Berserkers Powerlifting, in Toledo, and Entrena Intenso, in Rivas-Vaciamadrid, Madrid.  Her initiative has been a resounding success, as some of the athletes who now train weightlifting thanks to Loida's project competed in the Spanish Championships last weekend.