A little less than a month before the World Championship of Athletics to be held in Eugene, United States, the leadership of the king sport in Cuba reported that the star jumper from Camagüey Juan Miguel Echevarría requested the release of the national team, which means a significant loss for the Antillean sports movement in general.
Without dwelling too much on the matter, the national commissioner of the discipline, Yipsi Moreno, said this Friday at the Barrientos Memorial conference that the Tokyo Olympic runner-up sent a letter in which he expressed his desire to disassociate himself from the Antillean squad due to personal problems.
Rumors about Juan Miguel’s situation had been going around for weeks, especially after he was excluded from the Cuban team that participated in the Ibero-American Championship in Alicante, Spain, at the end of May.
Up to 40 athletes traveled to the Old Continent for one of the first outdoor events of the current season, but Echevarría was not part of the call for “preparation strategies” for the World Cup, the directors of Cuban athletics abounded.
That statement raised many doubts about the man from Camagüey, who had not competed for more than nine months after the Olympic Games, where he won the silver medal with a jump of 8.41 meters before injuring himself. In that period, he went through the logical rehabilitation process and then his insertion in the winter season was handled with great caution, although he was training with the national squad in Spain.
Indoor world champion in Birmingham 2018 and world bronze in Doha 2019, Juan Miguel (23 years old) was the main exponent of the length in Cuba and the most promising jumper in the country since the stellar Iván Pedroso retired 20 years ago. However, this episode definitively distances him from the Island teams and, with almost total certainty, will open the doors for him to settle abroad and seek to compete under another flag.
The jumping specialties in Cuba have suffered various blows. Remembered are the cases of triple jumpers Alexis Copello (Azerbaijan) and Pedro Pablo Pichardo (Portugal), to whom we can add those of Jordan Díaz and Andy Díaz last year.
Jordan (19 years old), already a Spanish national, has broken the national record of the Iberian country on two occasions in recent months and holds the best world record of 2022 (17.76 meters), slightly ahead of Andy Díaz himself (17.64), who until now has been competing independently under the auspices of the Libertas Livorno club.
