How easy it is to change man

The clock reaches 5 o'clock. Under the "biting cold" of dawn in the Serra de Bucelas in Loures, ten players of the skating hockey team of Sporting Club Portugal are facing a group of ice water. They are "entangled in hands and feet" by a rope and will have to jump into the water under the command of "two figures in black, shaven hair and camouflage dress." The athletes' cries of courage are interrupted by the noise of their bodies to submerge in the icy water and replaced, already to the surface, "by insults and less adequate language" directed to bad luck and its instructors. I Mário Vasa and journalist and Frederico Bártolo we follow the various team building exercises that included abseiling, climbing, combat and cardiovascular endurance and concluded that the players "were not happy." "They did not exteriorize it, at least," they justify. "Closed, devoid of any technology, they faced the hardness [of the exercises], day and night, in a military barracks, scrupulously fulfilling what the two mentors, hitherto unknown two, indicated." Bártolo believes that the players have united, "fought against adversity together". "No one defected, even if everyone thought about it." He saw the players "angry, happy, relieved or exhausted and unable to think," but concludes that "they will hardly forget what they have lived and they will hardly be what they were."