Cuban athletes being coached by Russians

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32706, 8 September 1971, Page 14

Cuban athletes being coached by Russians

(By

RICHARD BEATTIE,

and a red beret that I recognised from Russia, and I yelled, ‘I know you. You’re Russian, too.' They had Russians posing as Cuban coaches.” The coach of the Cuban volleyball team, considered one of the strongest at the games, was an East German, who reportedly, along with the Russian coaches, is on a two-year assignment to Cuba. Just how improved the Cubans are was illustrated by their success in the first week of the games: they doubled the number of medals won at the 1967

The mysterious death of a red-shirted Cuban athletic official at the Pan American Games in Colombia highlighted the atmosphere of intrigue that surrounded the Cuban team after its arrival in Call. Unlike the American team, which seemed to be taking the games as if they were trials for next year’s Olympics, the Cuban team went to Colombia with ft sense of national prestige at stake. Outstanding sporting achievement among top international competitors is one of the few ways Fidel Castro’s regime on the Caribbean sugar island can show the world that it is as good as any nation. In an effort to produce top. athletes the Cuban Government has solicited expert trainers from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries. The appearance of Russian trainers at the games came as somewhat of a surprise to some of the American competitors. George Frenn, a member of the United States team and a hammer . thrower, spotted a familiar face in a crowd of Cubans standing next to him in the Pascual Guerrero Stadium last week, "I knew I had seen the guy somewhere before,” Frenn said. “I started smiling at him, he sort of smiled back, and I spotted this stainless steel tooth in his mouth. Anybody who has ever been to Russia knows that Russians use stainless steel to cap their teeth. "So I pointed at him and shouted, *1 know you. You’re Russian, not

Cuban.’ Then I saw another guy with a Cuban uniform

'‘Sydney Morning Herald” correspondent in New York)

: games in Winnipeg, Canada. One of the greatest upsets the Cubans have so far unleashed was their 73-69 win over a crack American basketball team. Rumours have been circulating about impending defections and one story of a top sprinter being beaten after he tried to defect. Manuel Conzalez Guerra, head of the Cuban Olympic Committee, said that three members of the Cuban team are missing. He believed that one had defected, while the other two had been kidnapped.