2024-04-07 14:22:27
Text: Raúl del Pino
Photo: RL Hevia
The Emirates Arena in the Scottish city of Glasgow will be dressed in its best clothes from this Friday until Sunday, when the cream of the world’s athletics – or at least a large part of it – will meet at the 19th edition of the World Championships in Covered track.
Cuba will attend only four participants, two of each sex and all in the triple jump specialty, to an event where 651 athletes (331 women and 321 men) from 133 countries will converge, among which 22 champions from the previous competition in Belgrade stand out. two years ago.
Precisely, among those twenty defending monarchs appears the Antillean Lázaro Martínez, who from that title won on March 18, 2022, became the benchmark for the specialty on the American continent along with his compatriot Cristián Nápoles.
Martínez’s gold in the Serbian capital was followed by silver at the 2023 Budapest Outdoor World Cup and the title at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile. Naples, for its part, did not attend the previous indoor competition, but did climb to the third place on the podium in last summer’s global event, as well as in the continental multi-sports event in November.
However, neither of them has managed to overcome the 17 meter barrier this year, so we will have to wait for what they can do on Saturday the 2nd in a competition to which the Algerian Yasser Mohammed Triki, brand new, arrives in great form. winner in the gold category of the World Athletics indoor world circuit.
Martínez and Nápoles will try to continue the trail of success of the Cuban men’s triple in universal indoor competitions, where the island exhibits an unparalleled haul of 16 medals, starting in the same first edition of these championships in Paris 1985. In that harvest, the golds from Yoel García (1997), Ernestó Revé (2014) and Martínez himself (2022), in addition to seven silvers and six bronzes.
If this duo has been used to teaming up on top-level stages for some time, Liadagmis Povea and Leyanis Pérez are not far behind. The two women from Pinar del Río also have solid results in the last couple of years that have placed them among the elite of a specialty whose queen and lady is the Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas.
But this time the pupil of Cuban Iván Pedroso will not be present, nor will the Ukrainian Maryna Bekh-Romanchuk, silver in Belgrade and Budapest, so Pérez starts in the “pool position” of the experts to climb to the top of the podium on Sunday the 3rd. This criterion is supported by the jump of 14.86 meters that she achieved in the French fair in Modeville at the beginning of February, which catapulted her to the top of the world ranking.
The history of the Cuban women’s triple in indoor world championships is not as rich as that of the men, but even so it can also boast of an indoor monarch in the figure of Yargelis Savigne, who in Valencia 2008 captured a sequence of 15.05 to stay with the gold medal.
The Guantanamera athlete herself had to settle for silver in Doha 2010, while in Istanbul 2012 she was left off the podium, displaced by her compatriot Mabel Gay, who by winning the bronze added the island’s third and last medal in these events.
Beyond the medal aspirations of the four contestants from the Greater Antilles, it is worth remembering that they all come from a very extensive 2023 calendar and are now at the beginning of the final stretch of their preparation for the Paris Olympic Games , this year’s fundamental competition.