Cuba continues to suffer from the unstoppable escapes of its athletes. This Thursday, the escape in Mexico of Yixit Martínez and Daymaris Millet, both from the national basketball team, and that of Jorge Patterson and Yudisleidys Rodríguez from the rowing delegation, was confirmed. With them there are already 64 athletes who this year took advantage of concentrations abroad to desert.
Martínez and Millet separated from the team in Mexico City, where they made a brief stopover before flying to Chihuahua, a state on the border with the United States, where this day the Cuban quintet will debut on the Centrobasket court, public Cubalite.
The escape of Millet, who plays in the forward position, represented a hard blow for the squad led by Márgaro Pedroso. At 22, the habanera had been fundamental in the 2014 Centrobasket U-15 events and the FIBA America Championship for children under 16 years of age, but the most relevant was the conquest of the caribbean championshipin Havana last July, by beating the Dominican Republic by a score of 79-60.
Instead, Martínez had been gaining experience and was considered a natural replacement for the delegation made up of 12 Cubans. Despite the defections, “the main objective is to qualify in the top four of the tournament,” Dairis Tornell told Play Off Magazine.
Being among the first four teams guarantees the Cuban representative his ticket to the FIBA AmeriCup in 2023 as well as to the Central American and Caribbean Games also next year.
Also in Mexico, this Thursday the escape of two other Cuban rowers was confirmed. Patterson and Rodríguez slipped away during one of the training sessions they had been carrying out on the Virgilio Uribe Olympic track in Mexico City.
The best classified of these two rowers is Patterson, who with a time of 5:52.74 minutes, in the modality of four pairs of short oars, won a bronze medal at the Pan American Games held in Lima in 2019. His teammates were Boris Luis Guerra, Reidy Cardona and Adrian Oquendo.
Yudisleidys Rodríguez had her first outing in international events in Mexico and it was also the scene of her escape.
The president of the Cuban Rowing Federation, Ángel Luis García, tried to make the leaks in his discipline less scandalous. “The abandonment of the delegation by six athletes does not affect our purpose”, commented to the official media Hit. “We maintain the objective of classifying all the boats to San Salvador 2023.”
Before Jorge Patterson and Yudisleidys Rodríguez left Boris Luis Guerra. The habanero obtained together with Adrián Oquendo the silver medal in double pair of short oars at the Pan American Games in Lima 2019; In addition, in September, he reached the quarterfinals in the same modality together with Carlos Andrei Ajete, in the World Rowing Championships, in the Czech Republic.
Two days after the escape from Guerra, they did Ernier Tamayo, Alexei Carballosa and Nayala Torres. The last two of this group have already entered the US, where they intend to continue their sports career.
This Thursday, the departure of Cuban baseball player Roidel Martínez from the Island was also announced. The gardener asked to leave after being cut from the Under-23 squad. Through his social networks, the man from Pinar del Río shared a video on June 7 in which he exposed his annoyance to the journalist Osbel Benítez Polo for being relegated from the U-23 national team with no other argument than “we have seen, we have spoken and you cannot be on the team,” the coaches told him.
After weeks and weeks of waiting and bureaucratism, he finally obtained his discharge, the journalist Francys Romero revealed on his social networks. “Martínez will settle in Mexico and will seek to sign with a Major League Baseball organization. He has the tools and excellent physique to demonstrate all of his talent.”
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