With a sports career spanning almost three decades, sport shooter Leuris Pupo Requejo added one more title in the Pan American Games, taking place today in Chile, and now looks at Paris Olympics 2024.
In air pistol rapid fire, Pupo won the gold medal in Santiago 2023, his fourth medal in these competitions, after winning in Santo Domingo-2003 and Rio de Janeiro-2007 and finishing with the silver medal in Lima-2019.
This simple man from Holguin gave an interview to Prensa Latina at the Pudahuel shooting field in Santiago de Chile, one of the venues of the event that brings together more than seven thousand athletes from the continent. “I’ve been in this sport for a long time, it’s been 27 years since I started my career in 1998 and Maracaibo was my first Central American and Caribbean Games,” he recalled.
Since then, he said, I have won many medals in Central American, Pan American, World Cups and the Olympic Games.
Pupo won gold at London-2012 Olympics and silver at Tokyo-2020, and is preparing for Paris-2024, after qualifying directly at the XIII Pan American Championships in 2022 in Lima, Peru.
It will be my seventh Olympic Games, I hope firstly to make a good score in the qualifying stage and then in the final, when you start from scratch, to fight to climb the podium, he said.
Regarding Santiago-2023, he expressed feeling happy with this venue, with the solidarity of its people.
“People always look for us, support us and want everything to go as well as possible and together we are achieving it,” he said.
“It is a tough battle,” he said, and cited as an example the effects on sports shooting, since neither American-made ammunition nor weapons can enter into Cuba, which forces athletes to train in other places with the cost that it includes.
Regarding the country’s participation in Santiago-2023, he said that he aspires to contribute the best as possible and remain among the world elite, despite the economic problems.
Cuban sport has always had a lot of experience and little by little we are returning to the triumphant path, he commented.
With information from Carmen Esquivel Sarría/Prensa Latina / Translated by Radio Angulo
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