If we want to compare the public health professional with an athlete and his sport, certainly the discipline that is more likely to be used as a paradigm would be the decathlon. In fact, if the decathlon is a “combined event in athletics consisting of ten track and field events”, public health incorporates a real interdisciplinary approach based on epidemiology, biostatistics and health planning. Environmental health, community health, behavioural health, health economics, public policy, insurance medicine and occupational medicine are other important and apparently different subfields, linked by the mainstream of prevention.