Inglorious milestone as Cuba goes medal-less for the first time at World Athletics Championship, but a Cuban wins Portugal’s only gold

The poor performance of Cuba in the recent World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, has caused a wave of comments inside and outside the Caribbean island.

For the first time in the history of the Worlds, dating back to 1983, Cuba says goodbye without any medals.

It is logical this performance draws the attention of the experts when it comes to a country that ranks eighth in the historical table of medals with 50 overall: 22 gold, 14 silver and 14 bronze.

In Olympic history, Cuba has won medals in athletics since Tokyo 1964 when Enrique Figuerola won the silver medal in the 100 meter dash behind U.S. champion Bob Hayes. Figuerola’s was the only medal of the reduced Cuban delegation.

The Olympic harvest to this day could have been greater for Cubans if they had not been absent from the Games for joining the USSR-led boycott of Los Angeles 1984 and North Korea’s “mini-boycott” of Seoul 1988.

This time, since the Cuban delegation left Havana, it did not carry good omens, although there were hopes in the discus thrower Yaimé Pérez, the long jumper Maykel Massó or the triple jumper Lázaro Martínez, medalists in the Doha 2019 World Athletics Championship, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics Games and the Indoor World Cup in Belgrade, Serbia.

The team had left Cuba with 15 athletes, but arrived in Eugene with 14 after javelin thrower Yiselena Ballar defected on a stopover in Miami.

At Hayward Field only four athletes were among the top eight but without a podium finish: Maykel Massó and triple jumper Leyanis Pérez were fourth, high jumper Luis Zayas sixth and Yaimé Pérez seventh.

Criticisms of this poor performance are covering a spectrum of problems, but most focus on the causes for key talent to break with the Cuban Athletics Federation, either requesting their withdrawals and then leaving the Island, abandoning the delegations where they train or compete abroad.

The most striking case in Oregon was that of triple jumper Pedro Pablo Pichardo, a native of the Santiago de Cuba province and trained in sports in the Caribbean nation.

“This medal belongs to Portugal, I no longer have anything to do with Cuba,” Pichardo declared to the press in his new country shortly after winning the title of triple jump world champion, with his 17.95 meters, in his first attempt.

Pichardo became the seventh Portuguese to win a World Athletics title, after Fernanda Ribeiro, Manuela Machado, Carla Sacramento, Inês Henriques, Rosa Mota and Nelson Évora.

This was the only medal for Portugal at the World Championships.

A year ago Pichardo had won the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo, the only gold medal for his new country.

Pichardo leads the triple jump world ranking and won the 2021 Diamond League. At Doha 2019, in his World Athletics Championship debut as a Portuguese, he finished fourth.

In his statements in the mixed zone at Hayward Field, the 29-year-old athlete dedicated his victory to his father and coach Jorge Pichardo, his family and also the country that welcomed and naturalized him on November 13, 2017.

Pichardo has a personal record of 18.08 achieved in May 2015 when he was competing for Cuba.

Pichardo entered the history books of Portuguese sport, just four years after his defection with the gold in Tokyo.

His gold medal was the fifth in all of the country’s Olympic history. He was preceded by Carlos Lopes (1984), Rosa Mota (1988), Fernanda Ribeiro (1996) and Nelson Evora (2008), all in athletics.

Pichardo has become a national record holder in Cuba and Portugal

In April 2017, Pichardo left the Cuban team in Stuttgart, Germany, where he was preparing for the 16th World Athletics Championships, in London. He was then the most promising athlete for his country. He had already won silver medals for Cuba at the Moscow 2013 and Beijing 2015 World Championships, and a bronze at the Indoor World Championships in Sopot, Poland.

At the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he was unable to compete due to an injury to his right ankle. Thus an almost certain medal for Cuba vanished.

Eight months later, Pichardo left the team and soon reappeared in Lisbon, Portugal recruited by the athletics section of the famous Benfica club. In November 2017, seven months after his arrival, he was granted Portuguese nationality and from August 2019 he was authorized by World Athletics to compete under the new flag.

The now-Portuguese won his first World Athletics gold in Eugene with Hugues Fabrice Zango, from Burkina Faso, bronze medalist in Tokyo 2020, rising to second place with 17.55, and China’s Yaming Zhu, taking bronze, with 17.31, in a final in which the Cuban Lázaro Martínez, who beat Pichardo in the indoor world championship in March, was excluded for three bad jumps.

The flight of talent from the island is not a new event, but it has accelerated in recent months in sports such as athletics. If those athletes had all remained and competed for Cuba in Eugene, surely they would’ve ascended several podiums while holding a Cuban flag.