Stories to tell of Cuba’s “foreign legion” that achieved several podiums in Tokyo 2020 and promises others in Paris 2024

At the age of 43 Raul Valdes made his Olympic dream come true but not with his country’s national team.

“For me it is a pride to represent this flag, a country that opened its doors to me and I would not hesitate to do it again a thousand times, thanks Dominican Republic,” wrote the pitcher, a native of Havana, on social networks.

The player had left Cuba in 2003 for the Dominican Republic where he shone in all these years in the local professional championship and with forays into the U.S. Major Leagues.

The bronze medal won by the Dominicans in the Olympic baseball tournament in Tokyo was the first medal for the Caribbean nation in team sports at the Olympic Games.

Three-time Olympic champion Cuba failed to qualify for the event... but there was a Cuban.

A day before the closing ceremony, Valdés closed with an Olympic medal the work of the Cuban “foreign legion” in the Games.

Twenty-two Cuban-born athletes competed in Tokyo for 10 other countries, most of them developed within the island’s sports system, and they performed well during the more than two weeks of competitions.

A gold medal won by the naturalized Portuguese Pedro Pablo Pichardo in triple jump, and four bronze medals was the main balance of this contingent.

Pichardo was greeted by nearly a hundred people and a brass band at the Lisbon airport, a very different atmosphere from the one he found one day in April 2017 shortly after defecting from a Cuban delegation in Germany. He entered through that same air terminal unnoticed and hesitantly.

“My only way to thank the way this country has received me is by bringing medals and great results. I did not expect to be chosen by the Portuguese Olympic Committee to carry the flag at the closing ceremony. I will continue to work to win more medals, whether Olympic, World or European. I hope to be welcomed in this way again in three years,” he said.

The other bronze medals, in addition to Valdés, were won by boxer Loren Berto Alfonso, wrestler Abraham Conyedo and karate player Ariel Torres.

Alfonso competed for Azerbaijan country he had already represented in the last European Games in 2019 where he won gold in the 81 kg. In Tokyo he was eliminated in the semifinals, in a close fight, by his fellow countryman and in the end Olympic champion, Arlén López.

This was the second fight between Cubans in Olympic boxing after the one between Julio César la Cruz and the Spanish nationalized Emmanuel Reyes in the 91 kg quarterfinals, with victory for the former.

Alfonso moved from Cuba to Azerbaijan in 2017 to improve his chances of competing in international events according to statements collected on the official Tokyo 2020 site.

“I was number three in Cuba, but only because the one who was considered number two participated more in competitions than me. However, I never lost to him . I grew up in a poor family. I need to support it.

“The salary here in Azerbaijan is normal, it’s enough for me. I send money to my mother and daughter in Cuba. It was for the sake of my family that I agreed to be away from her. It is difficult not to see my daughter, but it has to be like this” .

Alfonso is from Pinar del Rio, Cuba’s westernmost province, as is Lorenzo Sotomayor, the other Cuban fighter who was Olympic runner-up for Azerbaijan at Rio 2016 and now lost his first fight.

Representing Italy, Abraham Conyedo won bronze in the 97 kg wrestling division after defeating Romanian Albert Saritov, losing to American Kyle Snyder and later defeating Canadian Jordan Steen and Turkish Suleyman Karadeniz....

In 2010, at the age of 16, he was silver medalist at the 1st Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, in the 100 kg category, as a member of the Cuban delegation.

Conyedo landed in Rome in 2017 and in 2019 received his new nationality and thus join in the Italian team with the veteran Cuban wrestler and European and world multi-champion, Frank Chamizo, Olympic bronze medalist in Rio 2016, and who in Tokyo was eliminated from the preseasons by the American Kyle Dake.

Ariel Torres left Tokyo with a historic bronze medal: he is the first athlete from the United States to win an Olympic medal in karate, a sport that made its debut at the Games. In the dispute for that metal the Cuban defeated the legend of this martial art, Venezuelan Antonio Diaz.

Torres announced that the $15,000 he will receive from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee for his bronze medal will be given immediately to his parents who moved him from Cuba to the United States when he was four years old, first settling in Newark, New Jersey and then moving to South Florida.

As a child Torres used to dress up in his karate uniform and stand at traffic lights in Hialeah, FL, while his father held a sign with the inscription “Donations for Karate Competition.”

“I had a jar and people would throw in a dollar, 25 cents, whatever they could. We would do that for hours and hours a week, trying to accumulate the money to go to competitions in North Carolina from Florida. There were times when we couldn’t even eat because we were sending all the money toward karate, so it was hard,” Torres said according to teamusa.org.

The rest of the Cuban “international” expedition didn’t make the podium but a good part of them came close, even eliminated in their first performance as boxer Yarisel Ramirez, wrote her story.

Ramirez, a native of Guantanamo and member of Team USA, lost in her debut against the Croatian Nikolina Cacic in the 57 kg, however she became the first Cuban-born female boxer to compete in Olympic Games, after having done it in the Pan American Games in Lima in 2019 where she won a bronze.

In her native country women’s boxing is still not officially recognized by the authorities.

Despite the tradition of boxing on the island, the world is still surprised with this veto, which has been talked about again these days after the good performance of Cuban boxers in the recent Olympic tournament.

The boxers won four gold medals that placed Cuba in 14th place in the list of medals by country.

In total, the Cubans accumulated seven gold medals with the contributions of Greco-Roman wrestling (2) and canoeing (1).