Cuba finished in eighth place at the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, where triple jumpers Leyanis Pérez and Liadagmis Povea won gold and silver, respectively. The small Cuban delegation, also including Lázaro Martínez, tied with France and New Zealand in a medal table led by the United States by a wide margin.
In addition to these three athletes, Andy Díaz competed for Italy and climbed to the top of the podium with a spectacular leap of 17.80 meters in the triple jump, the best of the season in that discipline. The Havana native followed in the footsteps of Yamilé Aldama, another Cuban jumper who won a World Indoor Championship under the flag of Great Britain.
Adding all these crowns together, 15 Cuban athletes have won 22 titles in these competitions. The haul (20 gold medals) of those representing Cuba places our country in an all-time fifth place, behind only the United States (125), Russia (52), Ethiopia (35), and Great Britain (24).
The first champion
All roads lead to Rome, and when talking about Cuban athletics, a reference to Javier Sotomayor is usually a must. The illustrious son of Limonar paved the way for the island’s golden age at the World Indoor Championships during the 1989 Budapest event, where he set a record of 2.43 meters, which still stands.
His competition in the Hungarian capital was almost perfect, as he only made one mistake under 2.35 meters and cleared the rest of the heights on his first attempt. Behind him were German Dietmar Mögenburg and Swede Patrik Sjöberg, both with 2.35 meters.
This was the first of four titles won by the “Prince of Heights” in world indoor events, having also won in Toronto in 1993 (2.41 meters), Barcelona in 1995 (2.38 meters), and Maebashi in 1999 (2.36 meters). He also won a silver and a bronze for a grand total of six medals, a tally that places him as the male athlete with the most medals at World Indoor Championships, tied with Bahamian runner Chris Brown.
Iván Pedroso’s empire
Men with at least five World Indoor Athletics titles? Iván Pedroso Soler. End of list.
The Cuban “Grasshopper” dominated the long jump between the 1993 Toronto and 2001 World Championships. During that time, he also won the Sydney 2000 Olympic title and his four outdoor titles.
Pedroso is the only man to have won five consecutive titles in the indoor event, a record that is almost impossible to break and very difficult to match. His golden history began when he was just 20 years old, in Toronto, where he dominated the event with a jump of 8.23.
But the best came in later events. In Barcelona in 1995 and Paris in 1997, Pedroso set a competition record with identical jumps of 8.51. This mark would be broken in Maebashi 1999, with a spectacular jump of 8.62. And the spectacular nature about it isn’t just the mark itself, but also the fact that the Cuban achieved it on his final attempt, surpassing Spaniard Yago Lamela (8.56).
The 22-year-old Spaniard broke Soviet Robert Emmiyan’s European record in the final round and it looked like he would break Pedroso’s streak of consecutive titles, but the Cuban found the strength to make a decisive leap that became the second-best mark of all time in the indoor long jump, behind only Carl Lewis’s 8.79 in 1984.
Now with the sign of legend hanging on his chest for eternity, Pedroso added another indoor world title in Lisbon in 2001, a much more relaxed competition that he won comfortably (8.43) ahead of Kareem Streete-Thompson (8.16), representing the Cayman Islands.
Hurdles and jumps, inexhaustible power
Javier Sotomayor and Iván Pedroso together won an impressive nine gold medals for Cuba at the World Indoor Championships, but the island’s list of achievements includes another ten titles spread across the hurdles and jumps, disciplines with a tremendous tradition.
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The first to cross the finish line in the hurdles was Andrés Simón, a high-caliber sprinter remembered by many for his participation in the 4×100 relay that won a historic bronze for Cuba at the Barcelona Olympic Games. However, he also stood out in his own right with his indoor title in Budapest in 1989, after twice breaking the national record for the 60-meter hurdles (6.54 seconds and 6.52).
In 1995, Aliuska López followed Simón’s path at the Barcelona World Championship, where she twice defeated Kazakhstan’s Olga Shishigina, who had not lost a single race in 1995. However, the Cuban sprinter prevailed in the semifinals and final, both times with a time of 7.91 seconds.
Two years later, in Paris, the star Anier García followed in her footsteps, narrowly defeating Britain’s Collin Jackson and U.S. Tony Dees. Anier was the second-worst starter among all the finalists, but he set a blistering pace in the race and came back to take the gold medal with a time of 7.48. He was only 21 years old.
The other golden story of the 60-meter hurdles features Dayron Robles, the world indoor champion in Doha 2010. At the Aspire Dome, the Guantanamo native was the last to react in the final, but he recovered and achieved an excellent time of 7.34 seconds to beat U.S. stars Terrence Trammell and David Oliver.
Robles achieved the second-best time of his indoor career (he had done 7.33 in Dusseldorf in 2008) and the third-best in history at that time, behind only Collin Jackson (7.30 in 1994).
In terms of jumping, in addition to the aforementioned Pedroso and Sotomayor, the other athletes to have reached the top are triple jumpers Joel García (1997), Yargelis Savigne (2008), Ernesto Revé (2014), and Lázaro Martínez (2022), long jumper Juan Miguel Echevarría (2018), and pole vaulter Yarisley Silva (2014).
Of all these stories, the most striking is that of Yarisley, who finished tied with three other competitors with 4.70 meters in the final in Sopot, Poland, but by making the fewest errors, she was able to win the crown. Meanwhile, Revé’s title came by chance, after Russian Lyukman Adams was suspended for doping and lost all his medals between July 2012 and September 2014.
For his part, Juan Miguel Echevarría became the youngest champion (19 years, 6 months, and 19 days) of the World Indoor Championships in all the field events at Birmingham 2018. The native of Camagüey dominated the long jump with a jump of 8.46 meters, enough to dethrone South African Luvo Mayonga, Olympic runner-up at Rio de Janeiro 2016, and U.S. Marquis Dendy, the defending indoor champion.
The pioneer in the triple jump category was Yoel García in 1997, when he defeated his compatriot Aliecer Urrutia, who arrived as the favorite, in the final, but an injury prevented him from competing in top form. Lázaro Martínez and Pedro Pablo Pichardo (already representing Portugal) also finished 1-2 at Belgrade 2022.
Finally, Yargelis Savigne was the reigning champion of Valencia 2008. The Guantanamo-born triple jumper had started strongly in the Spanish city with a time of 14.89, but Greek Hrysopiyí Devetzí quickly took the lead with a time of 14.93. The competition unfolded in this way until, on her fourth attempt, the Greek reached exactly 15 meters, a mark the Cuban had never achieved in an indoor competition.
With that weight on her shoulders, Yargelis showed off her class in a brilliant final attempt, landing the spikes at 15.05 meters, a Cuban indoor record. “I risked everything on the last jump,” said Savigne, who became the first Cuban woman to win a field event crown at these World Championships.
