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Cuba’s Olympic Committee on Tuesday called for citizen and sprint canoeing champion Fernando Jorge to be expelled from the refugee team competing in the Paris Olympics.
Jorge fled communist-ruled Cuba two years ago for the United States and won a gold medal representing Cuba at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
He is one of two Cubans on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Refugee Team, which includes citizens from Cuba for the first time since it first competed in Rio in 2016.
The Canadian Olympic Committee called for the “immediate expulsion of the above-mentioned athletes from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games” in a statement published in local media.
It said Jorge, 25, had violated “the rules governing the international Olympic movement” by “making disrespectful and false political statements about his country, his people and the sport that made him the champion of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games”.
The Canadian Olympic Committee condemned the decision to include Cuban athletes in the refugee team, despite the International Olympic Committee acknowledging that “these athletes were not displaced or persecuted as a result of war.”
The statement noted that “this confirms Cuba’s concerns about the real political motives of Cuban athletes joining the refugee team.”
The Cuban Olympic Committee said the move was aimed at “damaging the image of Cuban sports.”
The Olympic refugee team consists of 36 athletes from 12 countries. Another Cuban citizen is weightlifter Ramiro Mora, who now lives in the UK.
Cuba’s dire economic situation has caused about 5% of its population to flee in recent years, many to the United States.
In a recent interview with AFP in Florida, where he trains, Jorge described how he “defected” from a training camp in Mexico City in March 2022.
After 15 days of hard work, he and a colleague managed to avoid being discovered and kidnapped for ransom and finally sneaked across the US border.
As he attempted to cross the dangerous Rio Grande, he heard a woman screaming in distress and jumped in to save her.
“I told her, ‘Come on, we’re going to make it,’ ” he recalled.
Despite his heroics and Olympic gold medal, he was treated the same as other illegal immigrants.
However, his asylum application was approved and after a long wait he was accepted into the Olympic refugee team.
“I couldn’t be happier,” Jorge said. “I will represent this flag with great pride.”
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