The European Championship week in Munich can be seen on channels from August 11 to 21. You can find live broadcasts, highlights, the competition schedule, interesting news and topics on ‘s competition page.
Five years ago, a group of Cuban track and field athletes traveled to Germany to prepare for the World Championships.
At night, one of them quietly disappeared into a car waiting outside. Pedro Pichardo the father and her friend had driven 30 hours from Sweden to pick up a highly promising triple jumper away from the tentacles of his country of birth.
The open room door and the key taken to the reception were left in the hotel. Teammates saw Pichardo for the last time at dinner. After that, he jumped into the back seat and the 30-hour journey started immediately, without telling anyone.
The talented Pichardo felt that there were not enough conditions in Cuba to reach his potential. Mitta was full and he made a radical decision.
There was fury at home when Pichardo, who had abandoned the sports association of his country of birth, defected to Europe.
The Cuban kept a low profile until he returned to the public eye with a smile on his face in Lisbon, where he had started a new life.
After his disappearance, he appeared in front of the media to tell his own version of the story, which the Cuban media had not been allowed to reveal. He said that he will represent Portugal in the future and that he is aiming for a jump of more than 18 kilometers.
This summer, Cubans watched with dismay as the 29-year-old Pichardo won glory in the colors of his new homeland. The world championship came away with a difference of no less than 40 cents to the silver medalist, while the Cuban team was completely without medals for the first time in the history of the World Cup.
– This medal belongs to Portugal, Pichardo declared according to the news agency Reuters.
“We wanted to do things together”
Defectors are not a new phenomenon in Cuba. In a socialist state, professional sports are under control, so the departure of the best athletes is not a surprise in itself.
There are dozens of defectors among baseball players alone. At the end of July, it was reported that three members of the athletics world championship team defected in connection with the games. During the first half of 2022, there were already more than 20 athletes who defected.
With Pichardo, it was a bigger mess. The defector had already quarreled with the union years before, and had not gotten what he wanted. The coaching provided by the Cubans was not pleasing, nor were the training conditions.
As a result of the 2014 controversy, Pichardo was banned from training for six months, followed by another half-year ban from competition. With them, the Cuban sports federation tried to root out the rebellion, during which the athlete had been training secretly with his father.
He came back from the break in top condition, so hopes rose as the Rio Olympics approached, but an ankle injury watered down his race dreams. Pichardo received treatment for a stress fracture from Italian doctors, but at the same time the Cubans pressured him to compete despite the pain.
Pichardo did not agree to that, and the order to go home came on the same day, eight months before the triple jumper made his own decision.
– We wanted to [isän kanssa] to Europe. There was no specific country in mind. The only thing that was clear was that we wanted to do things together, in every country, he continued in the Portuguese media.
At the time of the previous World Championships, Pichardo was still just coming into his own. In the heat of Doha, he was the best in qualifying, but went home empty-handed after finishing fourth in the final. The jump at that time – 17.62 meters – would have been enough for a bronze medal in Eugene in July, but Pichardo has taken huge development steps in the last couple of years and has reached his own tens.
In that respect, his years-long struggle has been proven right. The big threshold issue was the freedom to practice. Pichardo wanted his own father as his coach, and not the Cuban national team coach. Therefore, he was ready to sacrifice a couple more years of his sports career, as the defection to Portugal meant a two-year wait before he was granted eligibility just before the 2019 Doha World Cup.
Pichardo and Jorge-father have been a close team since childhood. Father was an athlete himself, a high jumper over two meters tall, whose own career ended with a knee injury. The mother had a ballet background, so the sports education that started with mother’s milk, typical of Cuban athletes, was Pichardon’s path.
Pichardo has described his father as a perfectionist who interrupts his son’s console games to watch jumps on video. He makes notes in his own notebooks, which are full of various drawings of stick figures and jumping angles.
The cooperation has clearly borne fruit, even if the descriptions of it are vague. According to Pichardo, his jumping technique comes from his father’s international influences, drawn from lessons learned from previous 18m jumpers: Russian, American and British style.
Briton Edwards jumped the still valid world record of 18.29 in Gothenburg in 1995. American Harrison tried his best to 18.09 meters in 1996 and French Tamgho reached 18.04 meters in 2013.
Pichardo’s best so far has been 18.06 meters in 2015. However, there are no less than eight of his jumps in the top 25 all-time results, more than anyone else. Even so, his record is “only” fifth.
There is still 21 centimeters to go to the world record, but it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable idea for him at all. Sometimes Pichardo has said that even 19 meters will still break, but the flighty talk has been corrected a little lower.
Pichardo has been involved in sports club activities since the age of six and started training harder a year later. At the age of 14, he chose the triple jump as his sport, and a few years later he was invited to the capital, Havana, among the elite.
Until then, he had grown up as the youngest of four boys at home, in typically modest circumstances. Father worked as a sports coach, mother sold clothes and fruit on the streets. The diet consisted mainly of bread, rice and eggs. Many of his acquaintances tried to make a daring escape to the United States, while Pichardo dreamed of a better life with the help of his athletic talents.
In his hometown of Santiago, he ran barefoot, and trained on baseball fields and other grass, so there was a huge opportunity in Havana.
At the same time, it tested coping, because the family lived in the southern tip of Cuba. Havana was not far from the very opposite tip of the island nation. The distance was about 900 kilometers and the train journey took 18 hours. Pichardo has said that he got lighter from the sky by sleeping in the stands of stadiums or on the floor, eating whatever he could get his hands on. Father helped as best he could, as did other athletes who, as members of the national team, had arranged better conditions for themselves.
Survival required will, but there was no other place for one’s own will. That started the frustration that eventually led to leaving. After his defection, Pichardo was dismissed from the national team and missed the 2015 World Championships in Stuttgart. In addition, the athlete was banished from his home island for at least eight years.
Those years are about to come to an end, but the New Portuguese hasn’t given any indication of homesickness. The family left Cuba in his wake and now Pichardo has settled in Portugal with his athlete wife and his two-year-old daughter born in Portugal.
Not that everything goes smoothly in Portugal either. The weak position of athletics has been disappointing, as has the disparity of training conditions.
According to his own words, Pichardo has had to do his strength training in one place, his technique training in another and his track training in the third. In March of last year, he publicly lamented the lack of financial support and joked that he had only met the president of the Portuguese Athletics Federation once – by chance while filling up his car at a petrol station.
It may be that in the last year and a half the situation has changed, because Pichardo has won everything he wanted. At the Tokyo Olympics, he jumped to gold with a new Portuguese record.
Last year, he already summed up his achievements as an 18-meter jumper, Portuguese record holder, Olympic champion, EC indoor champion and two-time Diamond League winner as he looks ahead to the 2022 season.
In Tokyo, he had beaten the best Cuban by almost one and a half meters, the difference to the silver medalist was 39 cents. In last month’s World Cup final, the margin increased even more.
Now the hat trick is ready for the European Championships. There, if Pichardo succeeds, he can crush his rival, because on the list of Europe’s best results this year, no one can come within 67 cents of the Portuguese.
The men’s triple jump final is on the program at 21:15 on cookie week. Live broadcast on TV2, Areena and the application, as well as on radio waves on the frequency of Puhe.