Arley Méndez Pérez

Arley is a Cuban weightlifter who has become a naturalized citizen of Chile.​

He won a gold medal at the 2017 World Weightlifting Championship in the 85 kg category, and two gold medals at the Pan American Weightlifting Championship in 2018 and 2019. He obtained the South American Championship of Cali in the 81 kilogram category in 2021.​

The native of Pinar del Río, from San Cristobal, became interested in sports from a young age, first practicing baseball and later judo, before deciding on weightlifting, a discipline with which he achieved a gold medal at the Pan American level for Cuba in the youth category on two occasions.​

In 2013, he won a silver medal at the Youth World Weightlifting Championship in Lima with 191 kilos in the clean and jerk.​ That same year, he came to Chile to participate in the Pan American Weightlifting Championship in Santiago, where he won a gold medal.​

Although his family lived on the island, he deserted the Cuban national team and settled in Chile, where he lived as a guest in Iquique, before moving into the hotel of the High Performance Center of Ñuñoa,​ supported by the Chilean Weightlifting Federation and the Chilean Olympic Committee.​

He participated in national competitions while regularizing his immigration status, managing to break the Chilean national record in the 85 kilogram category in 2016, placing first in the Pan American ranking and fourth worldwide.​

After living undocumented in Chile for almost four years, and obtaining definitive residence papers in 2016, at the end of May 2017 he was granted nationality by grace in a unanimous Senate vote, proposed by the then president of the Chilean Olympic Committee, Neven Ilic.​

He represented Chile at the 2017 Bolivarian Games, where he won three gold medals, but they were stripped from him for not having properly accredited his Chilean citizenship.

Days later he participated in the World Weightlifting Championship in Anaheim, California, where he won three gold medals in his category by lifting 175 kilos in the snatch and 203 in the clean and jerk, totaling an Olympic total of 378 kilos.​

That same year, the Circle of Sports Journalists of Chile awarded Méndez the Prize for best athlete of Chile.

In May 2021 Arley won the South American Championship of Cali in the 81 kilogram category and obtained a ticket to participate in the Tokyo Olympic Games.