The Argentine star wanted to make public his interest in getting a house in Cuba, rented or bought.

The International Olympic Committee’s new reforms under the so-called 2020 Agenda are leading to important modifications in the selection process for cities in order to guarantee the success of the Games with an emphasis on their legacy and sustainability. The co-sponsorship of the Games in two cities from two countries which are different yet so close and which have restored diplomatic relations after the surprising turn in the policy of an American President, could attract the attention, at least for a moment, of the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic committees of Cuba and the USA. The International Olympic Committee has issued a proposal to modify the way of choosing the candidates for the Olympic order to make the games cheaper and to make them more attractive, in addition to considering that the seat be shared. So, it has opened the doors not only to wider applications, grating the hosting to an entire country, and to joint bids from more than one city but also to holding some competitions in a different country. "We want to create greater diversity in applications," said IOC president, Thomas Bach. These ideas will allow for the organisation of sports and entire disciplines outside the...

In Rio they will carry out 4,500 urine and blood tests. Really we will have to wait between four and eight more years to know how the story will definitely go for the table of medals in some Olympic Games, with this issue of the plague of doping and reanalyses saved for all this time. Right now the Ukrainian javelin thrower, Oleksandr Pyatnytsya has been ordered to return his silver medal that he won at London 2012 after returning a positive result in the "re-test" of his sample that revealed the presence of the anabolic steroid "dehydrochlormethyltestosterona" (a good name for a reguetón song). The athlete, 31, was second in those Games with a throw of 84.51 meters, seven centimetres behind the winner, Keshorn Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago. Those who were behind these two have been notified that they have gone up a step. The same thing happened to the retired Yipsi Moreno, who, when he least expected it, was called a few days ago and notified that he had a chance to become Olympic champion in the hammer throw when after eight years the event they discovered that the Belarusian Aksana Miankova had cheated. And in these rules,...

United States and Cuba have had a bridge ... And on that bridge - baptised "Roberto Clemente" - in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania- they will enter the ring for a unprecedented boxing spectacle between local fighters and arrivals from Havana in an official delegation that will leave in a few hours. The bridge, which has been named after the Puerto Rican baseball player who won two World Series with the team where he made his career, the Pittsburgh Pirates, since 1999. Clemente, besides being considered one of the best right-fielders in history, stood out for his concern for others, an interest that involved him in a plane crash in which he lost his life. He was carrying humanitarian aid to the victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua in December 1972. The match will be today, on July 30. It will not be top level, nor will it involve the best Cuban figures. Just one week away from the opening of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro that roll call was unthinkable. School and young boxers, and three Cuban national championship medallists will form the expedition. In the end, the poster will show 15 bouts with boxers ranging in age from 11...

Namibia Flores returned to the United States some days ago after attending the screening of a documentary about her life, which glosses over a young woman’s frustration over being denied the opportunity to represent her country, Cuba, as women’s boxing remains without recognition by the island’s State sports institute (INDER). According to some reports, Flores, who is already 39 years old, had left Cuba in March of this year to make her boxing debut in the United States, before age began to kick in. She traveled to Austin, Texas, to attend a film festival where the 16-minute documentary Boxeadora (“Boxer”) – a film that documents her ups and downs in a male-dominated gym in Old Havana – won an award. The young US filmmaker, Megan Smaker, is a University of Stanford graduate and a boxing aficionado. The young boxer, who was born in Cardenas, Matanzas, and settled in Havana’s neighborhood of Santos Suarez twenty years ago, tells OnCuba that, in addition to Texas, she traveled to Oakland and California to attend other screenings of the documentary, and that she did not consider competing in the United States at the time, despite restrictions in Cuba which prompted some people “to speak...