Antonio Castro-Soto Praised the IJF for its Successful Staging of a Grand Prix in Havana

“The sport is very well organised [internationally] and I must pay tribute to its president Marius Vizer,” he declared. On the last day of the event Mr Castro-Soto-Soto was summoned from his grandstand seat - where he had been watching alongside his elder half-brother Fidel Ángel Castro Diaz-Balart - to proudly hand over a gold medal to a Cuban athlete. It was one of two gold medals for Cuba, putting the home team in second place in the Havana Grand Prix medals table.
 
Pictured Left to Right: Mr Antonio Castro-Soto, IJF President Marius Vizer, and Mr Fidel Ángel Castro Diaz-Balart at the recent Grand Slam Judo event in Havana, Cuba. (All photos copyright of Paul Martin/ MediaZones)
 
He pleaded for more media coverage of judo to show the power possessed by sport and to highlight its benefits. Mr Castro-Soto, who in his youth was a brown belt judoka, pointed out: “Judo is a great sport that teaches respect. It teaches you how to win and how to lose and to respect one another.”
 
In early January 2016 the International Judo Federation won the Creative Sports Award for taking judo to hundreds of young refugees who live inside containers on the Turkish border with Syria, providing children fleeing the horrors of armed conflict with positive and healthy experiences.

Mr Castro-Soto said all sport should follow world judo’s initiative. “There are so many problems in the world, so much conflict now, but sport helps guide children away from this - and also away from drugs and shootings,” he said.
 
When Fidel Castro swept to power in the 1959 revolution, one of his first priorities was to make sport more available to the masses. ‘I am convinced that sporting activity is necessary for this country,’ Mr Castro had declared in a speech soon after his revolutionaries took control of the country.
 
‘It’s embarrassing that there is so little sport,’ the new Cuban leader had added, while saying the Cuban results in international competitions up till then had been ‘shameful’.
 
“He felt sport helped develop the character of young people - and I am proud to carry that on,” Mr Castro-Soto said. At university, his father had been selected as the best student athlete in the country. “My father had played sports like baseball, basketball and swimming. He had really enjoyed them and thought they were very important for children in particular.” Mr Castro-Soto lives and breathes his father's passion for sport and its positive role in society.
 
Now 47 and still an active sea-swimmer, Mr Castro-Soto explained his own move from sportsman to sports administrator.  “Once I couldn't play any more [competitive] sport because of my injured knee, I wanted to become a doctor in sports trauma so I could help athletes. And I also became involved in the administration and the development of sports.”
 
That has included a leading role in promoting his country’s most popular sport. He has served as vice-president of Cuban Baseball and as the national team’s doctor. (His speciality is orthopaedics.) And his ambitions go further.  

“I’m a Global Ambassador for Baseball,” said Mr Castro-Soto, “and I’m helping to try and get it back into the Olympic Games.  It would be a great achievement if we could manage that.”

Cuba’s baseball team won medals - three golds and two silvers - in every Olympic Games from 1992 until baseball was removed as an Olympic sport after the 2008 Games.  So its potential return could also add to Cuba’s future overall Olympic medal count.

At the 2012 Olympics in London the country garnered, in total, five gold medals - an achievement most nations of Cuba’s population (11.2 million people) could only dream of approaching. Cuba had won even more gold medals than that in all-but-one of the previous Olympics going back to 1976.
 
Mr Castro-Soto says the astonishing international success of Cuba in recent decades over a range of sports stems from exposing children to a wide range of games and then following up talent through special sports schools.
 
“After the Cuban revolution in 1959 the country invested in a lot more coaches and children played all sorts of sports. And if they were good at a particular one they were put in a special school to help them ever more.

“We had a special pyramid system - and we started right at the bottom - at the grass roots.  It proved particularly successful and something the country is rightly proud of.”