after leaving no medals for the first time in the history of the world championships in athletics, Cuban track and field squad faces the progressive return home with long faces. To the dismal result in the fight in Eugene, United States, we must now add the loss of the best exponent who remained linked to the national team: the discus thrower Yaime Perez.
The news spread like wildfire shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 26, when journalist Leonardo Ruiz (Play Off Magazine) will report the event to your profile from Twitter. Later, OnCuba spoke directly with two members of the Cuban delegation to the World Cup, who confirmed the withdrawal of Yaimé and physiotherapist Carlos González Morales.
World champion in Doha 2019 and Olympic bronze in Tokyo 2020, Yaimé was seventh in the global competition in Oregon, where she could not exceed 63.07 meters in the discus throw final. In the qualifying round, the woman from Santiago had reached 65.32 m, the best mark of a season with very few top-level competitions for her.
The Cuban flag bearer in Tokyo together with Mijaín López only appeared in domestic tournaments without ideal conditions for practicing the discus, in two competitions in Spain (Ibero-American Championship and Club League) and in a competition in France. In none of these contests did she coincide, for example, with the American Valerie Allman or the Croatian Sandra Perkovic, the main exponents of the discipline. She, too, had no chance to compete in the Diamond League.
Yaimé’s loss opens another huge hole in the national athletics team, which in the last year has lost several relevant figures such as Jordan Díaz, Andy Díaz, Yoandy Lescay, Yarisley Silva, Reynier Mena, Christian Nápoles, Leonel Suárez and Juan Miguel Echevarria.
Of all of them, some have achieved very relevant results in European competitions. Jordan, for example, exhibits the second best record of the season (17.87 meters) in the triple after becoming a Spanish national, while Andy Díaz, who competes under the protection of an Italian club, owns the third best record of the year (17.65 ).
With these jumps, these two young triple jumpers would have climbed to the podium in the recent World Cup in Oregon, only surpassed by Pedro Pablo Pichardo, also Cuban (nationalized Portuguese), who dominated the test with an impressive 17.95.
Reynier Mena, on the other hand, competes in a Portuguese club and less than a month ago he stopped the clocks in 19.63 seconds in the 200 meters. With this mark he would have won the silver medal in the World Championship, ahead of Kenny Bednarek (19.77) and Erriyon Knighton (19.80), second and third in Oregon, respectively.
