While the sport of wrestling often gets overlooked by some of the bigger sports in North America, the athletes that compete are some of the most dedicated you will find.

In other countries though, wrestling is a much bigger sport, and that’s why 20 wrestlers from the Prince Albert Wrestling Club found it to be such an honour when they were invited to head down to Cuba to train with a wrestling school at the Cuban National Training Center training facility.

According to manager and one of the coaches for the club Roxanne Richards, it started with an email at the end of June last year from Canada Cuba Sports and Cultural Festivals inviting them down south for a training opportunity in February of 2025. After a ton of fundraising and flight cancellations due to weather caused them to reschedule, they finally got to head down to Cuba for the Easter Break.

“I’m kind of that person that never says no to an opportunity, and I always tell my athletes, ‘if you have an opportunity presented to you, you say yes because you never know what you’re going to be giving up.’ So I said yes and I gathered up 20 athletes and a few coaches and we went down for a trip to Cuba. So what we did was since the end of June, we stepped into high gear and we did a lot of fundraising throughout the city. We did a raffle, we did barbecues, we we did all kinds of different types of fundraising to have enough money to go.”

The focus during the week long trip was mainly on wrestling and training, but the athletes also got to spend some time touring Havana, time on the beach, and some other touristy things to learn about the culture of Cuba. Still though, the wrestlers learned just as much about Cuban culture on the wrestling mats as they did around the community.

“The kids were able to connect with a lot of the Cuban athletes. That was absolutely amazing for them and eye-opening just to be able to go to a country like Cuba and learn what kind of life they have and what they experienced down there and the kinds of challenges that they have to face just to be able to train. The school that we trained with is a high performance wrestling school where they train three times a day and they go to school, so that’s really all they do, and most of the Cuban athletes were about 14 years old. Ours were a little bit older, but their level was a little step up from where we were. So it was really good training for us.”

The Cuban National Training Center is where the Cuban Olympic team trains, and it isn’t much. Just a cement building with four wrestling mats and a few flags on the walls, but it’s a building where some amazing athletes honed their craft. During their time there they got to meet a national hero in Mijaín López, a five time Olympic and five time World champion in Greco-Roman style wrestling.

López retired from the sport last year at the age of 41 as one of the most accomplished wrestlers of all time. The Giant of Herradura is the only athlete in the world to ever win gold in the same event in five consecutive Olympic games. He carried the Cuban flag for his country in all five Olympic Games he competed in, and so even though the Prince Albert wrestlers didn’t get a chance to train with him, having him stop by was still an amazing experience.

“He took pictures with us and he hung around for a few minutes and then he left, but it was pretty exciting to actually get a chance to meet him. To be able to be even in the building where he trained for the last 20-some years, it was pretty exciting. Even some of the Cuban coaches were crying when they saw him. This guy’s huge in Cuba obviously. It was a really, really great opportunity for the kids to be able to meet him.”

Even with the Prince Albert wrestlers being older and in theory stronger than the Cuban wrestlers they trained with, the difference in skill and experience heavily favoured the Cubans. With the Cuban wrestlers training three times a day, they didn’t get any sparring sessions in because of the skill difference, but Richards said that they were able to pick up a ton of lessons to bring back to Prince Albert.

“Our cardio level was pretty even because in Prince Albert, our head coach who is Cody Souter, he trains hard with their cardio. The part that we noticed that they do so much more than we do, and we are going to start changing that, is their agility level, their speed, their fast twitch motion, their ability to switch from one thing to the other. Some of the training that they did was so fast and so quick, and we were a little bit slow.”

While a lot was learned on the tours around Havana about the country’s history and culture, a lot more was learned about human connection. While Prince Albert’s wrestlers and the Cubans didn’t understand each other’s language, they were able to bond and have fun together through the one thing that connected them: the sport of wrestling.

“It was interesting because with the language barrier, you don’t get to explain where your hands should go or your arm or your leg. You have to show it, so some of our kids were laughing, they said, ‘it’s like having a full on game of charades’ because you have to just use your body to explain things and it was really challenging for them, but it was so good just to be able to to communicate that way which goes to show that you really don’t need the language. A wrestler is a wrestler no matter where you are.”

While the opportunity to return hasn’t been expressed yet, Richards said she would absolutely jump on the opportunity to take members of her team down south again.