Nassau.- THE OBJECTIVE of achieving Olympic places vanished this Sunday for the three Cuban teams that competed in the Bahamas 2024 World Athletics Relay Championships.
The best hopes of getting at least a place rested on the girls in the 4×400 meters, but the champions of the 2021 Silesia edition did not have enough of their best race this season to achieve it.
Debutant Melissa Padrón left the nerves of the first day behind, started as asked and made the change when only the Dutch favorites had done so.
Rose Mary Almanza, Lisneidy Veitia and Roxana Gómez followed him in that order with better times than those exhibited in the preliminary segment, but insufficient to neutralize the force deployed by the Swiss team, in the end the owner of the other ticket in dispute.
The girls from the Netherlands covered the distance in 3:27.45 minutes to make the predictions good. The fight behind her became tense at times, with Roxana covering part of the closing stretch in the classification zone, but she ended up taking its toll on the enormous effort.
In the end, the Swiss stopped the clocks at 3:28.30 minutes, to take the Cubans to third position with a time of 3:29.36.
Logical disagreement immediately took hold of Ricardo Molina’s disciples, who were left with the complex possibility of accessing the Paris event through ranking.
«I knew that they could improve what they had done in the playoffs, which gave us a margin to be able to meet the objective. It was what I asked of them and in that sense they complied, but we did not expect the Swiss women to run like they did. “That surprised us a little,” said Molina, convinced that the relays do not adjust in a short time.
“We must prepare better, train more and all the runners together,” she added.
The women’s 4×100 meters quartet also improved the image left in their debut, although their chances of qualifying seemed quite remote, given the quality of their companions in the repechage series.
A yellow card for a false start on Laura Moreira did not seem like a good sign after the disqualification on Saturday. However, the young woman controlled her nerves and this time there were no errors in the changes so that Jocelyn Echazabal, Yarima García and Yunisleidy García completed the route in 44.05 seconds.
Jamaica (42.74 seconds) and Trinidad and Tobago (43.54) secured the available tickets for that heatand for the Cubans there was the consolation of a fourth place, improving their top in the current campaign.
Quite the opposite happened in the same specialty for men, as the formation of Reinaldo Espinosa, Edel Amores, Yaniel Carrero and Shainer Reginfo had a night to forget.
More than speed, they lacked harmony in the baton exchanges, the fundamental cause of the discreet performance that sent them to an unexpected seventh position with a time of 39.39 seconds.
Fortune in that race smiled on the representation of Germany (38.57), while the Liberian boys staged an impressive finish to take their country’s record to 38.65 seconds.
The Cuban passage through the World Relay Championship did not yield the expected results and serves as a warning for the future. Beyond the indisputable effort and dedication of the athletes, an analysis is required to correct the errors seen now to consolidate the results in these modalities.
BAHAMAS LIVED ITS PARTY
Athletics is passionate on this island and that was demonstrated during the two intense days spent at the Thomas A. Robinson National Stadium, very crowded to enjoy the emotions that this type of races leave behind.
A light show with drones put an end to an event that defined 14 of the 16 relays that will animate each relay in the upcoming event under the five rings and that had the United States as the most successful country.
Botswana took advantage of the absence of the northerners in the 4×400 meters for men and took over the throne with a mark of 2:59.11 minutes, driven by the twenty-year-old Letsile Tebogo, double speed medalist at the Budapest 2023 universal event.
The Americans dominated the 4×100 meters of both sexes, in addition to the women’s and mixed 4×400 events. Their combination of women and men set the new competition record at 3:10.73 minutes, moving the Dutch quartet into second place (3:11.45), led by the stellar Fenke Bol.
