There were seven minutes left in extra time. It was hot, although the shadows of dusk had covered the pitch. The players were giving their all. They wanted to be world champions. It was then that Joel Stransky, with the issue 10 on his back, grabbed the ball with determination and kicked it hard for the final drop that would proclaim the Springboks, the South African national rugby team, world champions. That Saturday, June 24, 18 years ago, the joy overflowed throughout the country and swept away the nefarious policy of "apartheid". Mandela had done it. Blacks and whites found in sport a point of union with which to overcome a past full of hatred and violence and face the construction of a new social project . Nelson Mandela was certain that sport mobilizes people's emotions in a way that no politician can even come close to and he used his strength to put it at the service of his mission statement: to make South Africa the country of all, blacks and whites.

A century earlier, on June 23, 1894, at the Sorbonne University in Paris, another of the great figures in the history of modern sport, Pierre de Coubertin, launched the International Olympic committee in order to recover the Olympic Games and put sport at the service of building a better, more peaceful world, promoting the Education of youth, without discrimination, with an Olympic spirit that implies mutual understanding, friendship, solidarity and fair play. Since that year, Olympic Day has been celebrated all over the world, and since 1914, the year of the beginning of the First World War, the five intertwined rings have been used as a symbol of fraternity among peoples.

Nelson Mandela and Pierre de Coubertin were able to discover the values contained in sport and put them at the service of the individual to build a fairer and more caring society. It is necessary to work on these values every day with the youngest, to show them through the behavior of the most important sportsmen and women, and to transmit them through the media, aware that, as Coubertin said, "the essential thing in life is not to win but to fight well".

Mandela asked himself: "What do white people care most about? their religion? their God? yes, but also rugby. Let's see if we can use that passion to unify the country".

Use the power of sport to transform society; its values and principles to regenerate so many situations of injustice. "If sport does not serve to improve people, it is useless," said Conrado Durántez, Director of the Spanish Olympic Academy, a few months ago at the University of Navarra. Fortunately, in the world of sport there are many people who share the spirit of Coubertin and Mandela and who work daily to put it at the service of others. Yesterday was June 23. I would like to congratulate them all and thank them for their effort, their work and their illusion to try through sport to make a better world.