Despite the unstoppable flight of Cuban athletes in foreign events, the sports authorities have great ambitions for the next Central American and Caribbean Games, which will be inaugurated next Friday in El Salvador. The Island will compete with 503 athletes in 32 sports disciplines and calculates that it has a chance to obtain second place in the competition, after Mexico.
According to him newspaper Salvadoran The world, Cuba is one of the great favorites of the competition. The statements of Jose Antonio Mirandathe official to whom the National Institute of Sports (Inder) assigned the head of the delegation that traveled to San Salvador, are equally optimistic: Cuba seeks to win 70 gold medals, he said at a press conference held at the Salvadoran Crowne Hotel Square.
To achieve the mark, Miranda affirms that the Island – “a world power” when it comes to sports – has an arsenal of athletes who, in total, have won 84 world titles, 69 silver and 82 bronze medals. The director does not resist the temptation to compare his own medal table, out of 235 medals obtained in the region: “After the United States, Cuba has been the one that has obtained the most medals in the history of the area.”
At the head of the delegation are judoka Idalis Ortiz, twice world champion, who won several medals at the Olympic Games in London, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, and boxer Julio César La Cruz, winner, also twice, of the Olympic belt, and five times of the World Cup.
The Island will compete with 503 athletes in 32 sports disciplines and calculates that it has a chance to obtain second place in the competition, after Mexico.
Supporting these already historic athletes is a large number of athletes whose average age, Miranda pointed out, is 23 years. The official regretted that the Island saw its chances of winning more honors reduced due to the cancellation of several disciplines, such as women’s water polo, in which the Cuban delegation planned to stand out with 13 athletes.
Some 380 members of the Cuban bloc –75%– have experience in previous international events, while 123 are making their debut in this competition. Miranda guaranteed that everyone had received excellent preparation to achieve “maximum performance” and that the contest will be the opportunity to “evaluate” the participation of a group of athletes in the 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in Paris.
Cuba’s strengths remain in combat sports – boxing, wrestling, judo and fencing – but it has excellent prospects in chess, canoeing, track and field, men’s volleyball and water polo, handball, and field hockey for both genders.
Regarding this last sport, Miranda avoided referring to the escape of several of the members of the female and male delegations. In the case of the first team, three of their players managed to escape during team training in Spain and are living as refugees in that country. Interviewees Through this newspaper, they denounced the appalling living conditions to which they were subjected in their shelters on the Island.
Table tennis player Thalia de Armas will not return to Cuba either, after fulfilling her agreement with Club Jerez, in Spain, the country to which she had traveled last May. According to sports journalist sources Francys Romero, the Havanan will seek to continue her career in Europe.
The decision, Romero commented, represents a break with the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (Inder) that managed the contract with Spain. Cases like that of De Armas are, together with the abandonment of official delegations, increasingly frequent. Despite the difficulty of restarting her career in another country, the tennis player has something in her favor, the journalist says: her youth.
According to the statistics for the 2022-2023 season, in 15 games with Club Jerez, De Armas won 12 games and lost the remaining three, reaching a productivity rate of 80%.
Between May and so far in June, six Cuban athletes have used Spain as an escape port. Last Sunday, the sports shooting athlete Mitchell Onel Orellana left his team during training in Granada, where he was preparing for the Central American and Caribbean Games in San Salvador 2023. According to recognized the official media Jit, this discipline faces numerous difficulties to achieve the success of the training, due to the “lack of bullets and electronic systems” of counting.
Orellana’s desertion occurred almost on par with that of the handball players Arisleydi Márquez, Yudisaday Rodríguez, Melisa Arias and Geidy Maceo who took advantage of their stay in another European country, France, to escape.
Several weeks earlier, the discus thrower Denia Caballero He left the Cuban team after winning the silver medal in the Meeting Diputación de Castellón (Spain) with a throw of 63.17 meters. According to Romero, since the beginning of this year the Cuban Athletics Federation “hindered” the athlete’s negotiations with Portugal, “failing to comply with her management with a club” and causing her discontent.
Another Olympic medalist and world discus champion, yaime perez, defected after the sporting failure of the Island in the XVIII World Athletics Championship that was held in Eugene, United States.
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