CUBANS JUMPERS ARE STILL FLYING..

Pedro Pablo Pichardo’s whirlwind start to 2015 continued when he improved his Cuban triple jump record to a world-leading 18.08m at the Copa Cuba-Memorial Barrientos meeting in Havana on Thursday evening (28).

The 21-year-old Pichardo, the 2012 world junior champion and 2013 world silver medallist, has now improved the national record at three successive meetings in 2015.

He jumped 17.94m in Havana on 8 May and then broke through the 18-metre barrier with 18.06m to win at the first IAAF Diamond League meeting of the season in Doha on 15 May.

He has now gone two centimetres farther to consolidate his place as the third-best triple jumper of all time, behind only Great Britain’s world record-holder Jonathan Edwards and the USA’s Kenny Harrison.

His big jump in Havana came in the second round after he had opened with 17.93m. He passed his remaining four attempts.

"I did not expect this result because since my return (from Doha) I have been working on technical improvements, focusing on my run up and take off, but I still felt great,” he told local reporters.

Another amazing result by a Cuban trained Triple Jumper-where does the success of the Cuban jumpers comes from?

Cuba has the best training system in the world- even the IAAF claim that Cuba has the best jumps school in the world. These results are not only from hard training, but also from a combination of a great relationship of trust between athletes and coaches.

When an athlete has good results, everybody puts all the attention to the athlete and nobody talks about who is the coach behind all that work.  Journalists and commentators just mention sometime his name, but nobody knows what a coach has to go to through to bring an athlete to the top.   

To be an elite coach in Cuba is not easy, and sometime politics play an important part in this matter. This can make it difficult for many new coaches to reach the elite position, but it does not mean that they are inferior coaches-as I’ve mentioned before, to qualify as a coach in Cuba, you have to study for at least a 5 year degree in Sport Science, making even the minimum standards very high compared with many other countries.  Cuba has project work in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, sending many coaches abroad to do exchange work with different countries.  Among them are the jumps Coaches who, for the last 15 years, have done amazing jobs with many different athletes.

What few people know about, is the conditions in which the Cubans coaches have to work to achieve these results. For example, I have traveled all over the world and I have been in different places with really nice facilities, indoor and outdoor. Cuba as a tropical country, fortunately does not need an indoor track, but although they have a nice athletics stadium, the conditions can  never compare with an athletics track in Europe, in terms of the sophistication and range of equipment available.

For example, the weight room is very limited, and the equipment is really old, but the knowledge of the Cuban coaches, and their ability to improvise, is so developed, that although it is difficult to work under these conditions, nothing will stop them achieving their objectives. Cuban coaches are highly qualified and have a brilliant knowledge of athletics and their specialties, and therefore are recognized   as among the best coaches in the world.