Cuban wresting with no time to rest

The celebrations are still fresh for having been precisely selected the sport of the year in Cuba, the wrestle does not gloat in the thousands of success and has already drawn up its strategy for this first year of the new Olympic cycle with all the seriousness and commitment that it requires to maintain what has been achieved in 2024.

The Pan American Junior Games of Asunción (August) and the World Championship of the majors planned for Zagreb, Croatia (September), will be the two fundamental events that Cuban wrestlers will have in the current year, but I believe that the fundamental challenge is to realize the rescue of our emblematic tournaments.

We are talking specifically about Granma-Cerro Pelado, the most important event for this discipline at home, and to which dozens of Olympic and world champions of all geographies and styles have come throughout its history.

Due to the impacts of the pandemic this traditional lid has not been celebrated since 2020, and although apparently the results have not suffered much, the second figures do feel it because this was the ideal scenario to run into other ways of fighting, since in domestic contests and the usual end-of-year Gala is almost an internal cap.

It is now expected that in February the action will return to the mattresses in Varadero, but everything will also depend on the call, affected in recent years by the decline of international tourism.

Several representatives of the Greco-Roman team are already in China: Kevin de Armas (60 kg), Yosvani Peña (77 kg), Daniel Gregorich (87 kg) and the world champion in Budapest 2023 Gabriel Rosillo (87 kg), who plan to hold an extensive training base for the Pan American Monterrey Fighting Pan, agreed from 8 to 11 May.

Let's remember that Luis Orta (60) and Oscar Pino (130) were enlisted in the German Bundesliga, where the first had this weekend the finish of the grand final with the club ASV Schorndorf, which fell closely in the one-way (13-16) although ours contributed his individual triumph.

Cuba is expected to attend several stops in the Series Ranking, especially those of Croatia (5-9 February), Albania (26 February-2 March), Mongolia (29 May-1 June) and Hungary (17-20 July).

As for the Paraguayan youth event, tickets will have to be sought in the Pan American sub-23 scheduled in Mexico from April 11 to 13, and then try to maintain the place of honor achieved in the first edition of Cali-Valle 2021, in Colombia, where they razed with a balance of 15 medals, including nine golds.

In addition, the youth will have their usual orb contest, in this case with stage in the Serbian city of Novi Sad in October.

It is clear that the discipline of tackles and imbalances does not fall asleep on the laurels and aims to remain at the forefront of Cuban sport, although it is no longer on the mattresses the largest of all: the exceptional Mijaín López.