Cuban Boxing Champion Wins First Gold for Bulgaria

(ATR) Javier Ibáñez competed for the Cuban national boxing team until 2018 as one of the most promising fighters of that Caribbean country.

But last weekend Ibáñez must have surprised many Cubans who found the news on the Internet: the boxer had won the gold medal for Bulgaria at the international Strandja tournament held in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.

His triumph was featured on the front page of the International Boxing Association's official site.

Ibáñez, 24 years old, had received his passport as a Bulgarian citizen weeks before and this allowed him to represent Bulgaria for the first time. And things had better not worked out for him.

He incidentally became the first Cuban to win a medal, in any sport, for Bulgaria. And perhaps even he is also the first Latin American, at least in boxing.

Ibáñez arrived in the Balkan country in late 2018 alongside his team friend, super heavyweight Yordan Hernández. At the beginning of that year Hernández had competed as a "loan" under the Venezuelan flag, as a reinforcement for the "Caciques" franchise in the now-defunct World Series of Boxing.

They both knew the Bulgarian capital well, where in 2014 they had been proclaimed youth world champions and achieved their qualification for the Youth Olympic Games tournament in Nanjing, China months later. Ibáñez was distinguished as the best boxer of the world tournament

In Nanjing Ibáñez and Hernández were also crowned champions and from then on they began to be classified by the technicians and the press in Cuba among the main talents of the Olympic cycle that would culminate in Tokyo.

Already in 2017, Ibáñez and Hernández were called to the vanguard squad of the featherweight (57kg) and super heavyweight (+91) division in Cuba and were called up for the Olympic pre-selection that under the name of Domadores represented Cuba in the VII World Series AIBA Boxing where they faced the powers of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, among others, and participated in other important European tours.

Hernández tried now but could not qualify for the Bulgarian national team but the one who succeeded was his friend Ibáñez who achieved one of the three gold medals in men, from his new country, in the famous Strandja tournament, together with the two-time European champion Daniel Asenov (52 kg), and AIBA World Championship bronze medalist Radoslav Pantaleev (91 kg).

On his way to the top of the podium, Ibáñez defeated reigning world champion Mirazizbek Mirzakhailov of Uzbekistan by unanimous verdict to reach the semifinals.

In total, 220 boxers, including 91 women, competed in the Sofia tournament. Four of the five Confederations, Europe, Asia, America and Africa sent their boxers to Bulgaria.

Athletes represented Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Georgia, Greece, India, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Lithuania, Morocco, Moldova, Mali, Poland, Romania, Russia, Switzerland , Slovakia, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United States of America and Uzbekistan.

Bulgaria topped the medal table with five gold medals (two for women) followed by Uzbekistan with three - Brazil, Kazakhstan, Russia, the United States of America and Ukraine conquered one.

"The teammates are helping us acclimatize and we already feel like a family," Ibáñez and Hernández told the local media "Antena", which revealed the desire of both Cubans to represent Bulgaria at the Tokyo Olympic Games and in the World Cup Championship in Serbia by the end of 2021.

The two fighters have in their favor that the coach of the Bulgarian team is also Cuban, Joel Soler. In an interview with Radio Bulgaria, Soler reported that he was deputy chief technical officer of the Cuban national team between 2009 and 2014, the year he left for the European nation to meet with his Bulgarian wife.

Apparently, the two Cuban boxers left the island legally as Lorenzo Sotomayor did at the time, who represented Azerbaijan in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 where he won the silver medal in the 69 kg. Sotomayor never competed for a Cuban national team.

Written and reported by Miguel Hernandez

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