Cuba hopes more athletes means more medals
Jun 12, 2000 9:43 a.m. ET. Fox Sports. Andrew Cawthorne, Reuters.
HAVANA — Cuba, Latin America's Olympic powerhouse, plans to take its largest ever delegation to the Sydney Olympics starting in September -- but is declining to fix a medal goal.
"For us, part of our strategy has been not to waste one minute talking about medals," Humberto Rodriguez, head of Cuba's National Sports Institute (INDR), told Reuters on Saturday. "We believe it is important not to pressure the athletes in that respect."
Rodriguez said 242 Cuban athletes in 22 sports had already qualified for Sydney, and that the figure would pass 250 in coming weeks. The biggest squad previously was the 218 athletes who went to Russia in 1980.
Cuba's best hopes for Olympic medals would likely come from track and field, fencing, wrestling, judo, boxing, baseball and volleyball, Rodriguez predicted. "We are in excellent shape. ... I perceive a high moral state in our athletes, a heightened self-esteem, a strong determination."
The official -- whose island of 11 million people has 46 gold medals in Olympic history and came eighth in the medal count at Atlanta in 1996 -- said the Sydney games were especially important for Cuba.
The games come at the end of a decade of severe economic crisis in Cuba, provoked by the collapse of the former Soviet bloc around 1990 which put pressure on the state-sponsored, socialist sports system.
Recently, Rodriguez also noted, Cuban sports have suffered "an intensification of provocations" from outside which he hoped would be resolved before the Olympics began.
Those "provocations" include the suspension of three of Cuba's top boxing officials and doping cases against star high-jumper Javier Sotomayor and three weight-lifters.
The International Amateur Boxing Association's (IABA) recent sanctions against Cuba have, Rodriguez said, produced some "collateral effects" such as fewer invitations to foreign tournaments and criticism from some Africa countries which normally support Cuba.
In May, the IABA suspended three Cuban boxing officials -- including three-time Olympic champion Teofilo Stevenson and national team trainer Alcides Sagarra -- from attending foreign tournaments for not substantiating allegations of corrupt refereeing at a 1999 competition.
The IABA said the Cubans never produced evidence to back up accusations that a "corrupt mafia" was fixing results at the world amateur championships in Houston. Following the Cuban protest and walkout in Houston, however, one fight result was reversed, and some referees sanctioned.
Rodriguez said Cuba's sporting authorities were challenging the sanctions and "demanding justice," but the dispute was being kept away from the boxers, who were training normally and were in "excellent shape."
Speculation of a Cuban boxing boycott of Sydney in protest at the IABA measures was "absolutely" false, Rodriguez said. "Not for one moment did we think of that. ... We have nothing against the Sydney Olympic games," he said.
From Munich in 1972 to Atlanta in 1996, Cuban boxers have won 23 Olympic gold medals despite two politically motivated boycotts in Los Angeles in 1984 and Seoul in 1988.
Sotomayor and the weight-lifters, whose appeals against doping are due to be heard in coming days, will continue fighting to clear their names with the full backing of the Cuban government, Rodriguez said.
"We will keep raising our voice to defend the prestige, authority and honesty of our sportsmen because we believe in them," he said.
Rodriguez paid tribute to Cuba's communist President Fidel Castro as "the best sportsman of all time in Cuba" due to his passion for sport and political commitment to promoting sports on the island.
Critics say Castro has politicized sport here, turning Olympic success into a way of trying to show the superiority of socialism over Western-style capitalism. His government remains committed to keeping sports here amateur.
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