Havana/Team Pedroso left the Spanish city of Guadalajara and since last Thursday established itself at the High Performance Center (CAR) in Madrid. The site they have left was the training base of the triple jumpers and gold medalists at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Jordan Díaz Fortún – today in the United States under the orders of Travis Geopfert – and the silver medalist at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Juan Miguel Echevarría. Both were welcomed after desert by the Cuban Iván Pedroso.
The coach will continue to reside in Guadalajara for family reasons and, like Echevarría, they will make daily transfers. Meanwhile, the Spanish triple jumper of Moroccan origin Tessy Ebosele and the Spanish Carmen Rosales have moved to the Joaquín Blume Residence in the accommodation and training center for high-level athletes located in the CAR.
Luis Felipe Méliz, Pedroso’s collaborator, told the half spanish Guadalajara Diary that the change is due to the limitations that existed for the use of the Fuente de la Niña stadium. “Jumping is a very explosive technique that combines technique and speed. The athlete cannot train first thing in the morning because, in the cold, there is a high risk of injury,” he warned.
The move, according the sports newspaper Brand“it is a strategic move.” Pedroso has been part of the organization chart of the Spanish Athletics Federation since 2025. “The objective is twofold: to aspire to improve the performance of current athletes in view of the European Indoor Athletics Championships in Valencia 2027 and the Olympic Games in Los Angeles 2028, as well as to work on the orientation and development of young talents who can enter the Madrid CAR program.”
Méliz said that the team did not have a gym, they had to adapt to the hours that were available in a “multipurpose” and the sports sessions on grass depended on availability because they used the field for concerts. “They had been putting up with it for years, until now. In the CAR they are going to have everything together”, including an air conditioning module that does not exist in Guadalajara.
The athletes under Pedroso’s tutelage have won 25 medals. In Europe, eight medals stand out in the outdoor and indoor events.
The Spanish media considers that the movement left the province of Guadalajara “without elite Cuban athletics.” The athletes under Pedroso’s tutelage have won 25 medals. In Europe, eight medals stand out in the outdoor and indoor events.
In addition to the Cubans, there is the Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas (gold in Tokyo 2020 and silver in Rio 2016), the Spanish Ana Peleteiro (bronze in Tokyo 2020), the French Teddy Tamgho (gold in Moscow 2013 and Doha 2010), the Portuguese of Ivorian origin Nelson Évora (bronze in London 2017) and the Cuban and naturalized from Azerbaijan Alexis Copello (bronze in London 2017). All in triple jump.
Pedroso Soler, known as Ivan the Terrible either the grasshopperwas born in Havana and became one of the most important Latin American athletes. His departure from the Island is not clear, but the Cuban journalist based in Miami, Pablo de Jesús Socorro, who met him during the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Portland (Oregon), remembers in a chronicle dedicated to the triumph of Yulimar Rojas the dispute between the now elite coach and the regime to get permission to take to the Island a $130,000 Ferrari that he obtained in a competition in 1995 in Sestriere (Italy), where he was about to break the record. in long jump.
“The authorities forced Pedroso to agree to sell the car with the promise that they would give him a portion of the sale, but Ferrari and the organizers were inflexible, and it was Fidel Castro himself who had to authorize Ivan the Terrible to have his Ferrari, but with the warning that it should be ‘discreet in its use’ (sic) on the streets of Havana. I am not making up Castro’s words. They were told to us by Conrado Martínez Corona, then president of the Inder (Institute National Sports, Physical Education and Recreation), in a meeting with the management of the Circle of Sports Journalists of Cuba, of which I was the president at that time,” says the reporter in his text, Yulimar, Iván Pedroso’s Ferrari.
