HAVANA — Olympic and triple world
boxing champion Andy Cruz was caught trying to escape Cuba, the island nation’s boxing
federation said on Tuesday, accusing the fighter of “serious indiscipline”.
اضافة اعلان
The Cuban Boxing Federation (FCB) issued a statement
on the website of Cuba’s INDER sports institute saying it had been “informed
that the athlete Andy Cruz Gomez took part in an attempt to illegally leave the
country”.
But the FCB gave no more details about the escape
attempt nor Cruz’s current whereabouts.
Cruz, who won gold at the
Tokyo Olympics in 2021, is
considered by many experts to be the finest Cuban boxer of his generation.
He faces a temporary or permanent suspension from
Cuban boxing over the incident.
The FCB said it was a case of “serious indiscipline”
that would “generate corresponding assessments” that would soon be published.
Cruz did not turn up to the national championships
last week, nor a pre-competition training camp.
The Oncuba website had said two sources close to the
boxer claimed he had left the country, without specifying where he was headed.
The FCB said Cruz’s “obvious lack of motivation” was
behind his exclusion from a Cuban professional team trip to Mexico to take part
in a boxing match.
Boxing is a source of national pride for Cuba, which
has won 41 Olympic titles and 80 world crowns in the nominally amateur version
of the sport, now known officially as Olympic-style boxing.
There is nothing unusual about
Cuban athletes trying
to escape their country as Cuba has long prevented its sports stars from
turning professional, forcing them to compete for national glory rather than
personal rewards.
But Cuba has slowly been opening up to the
professional sport.
In April, communist authorities finally allowed
boxers to take part in professional boxing competitions, leading to the team
match against Mexico, which the Cubans won 6–0 with five knockouts, even
without Cruz.
Other sports such as baseball have also embraced limited
professionalism recently as last month Cuban authorities reached an agreement
with the sport’s international governing body, the WBSC, to allow Cuban
baseballers to manage their own professional contracts with clubs in foreign
leagues.
Even so, in recent months wrestler Ismael Borrero,
the Olympic champion at Rio 2016, and canoeist Fernando Dayan Jorge, Olympic
champion in Tokyo, both escaped the country.
Cuba is suffering its worst recession in three decades,
partly provoked by the coronavirus pandemic and the ramping up of US sanctions
under former president Donald Trump, which has led to mass migration.
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