Iván Lázaro Pedroso Soler

Iván is an athlete who specializes in long jump. A Cuban athlete, Olympic champion in long jump, seven-time world champion, four indoors and three outdoors. A glory of Cuban sports.

His first connection with athletics was in middle-distance events. He also liked high jump and sprint events, which helped him take advantage of his short stature, combined with a refined technique in which arms and legs contributed harmoniously to displacement through the air.

At age 12 he definitively settled into long jump, and at 17 he surpassed the eight-meter barrier for the first time (8.06).

The former jumper and coach Milán Matos introduced him to long jump, despite having only 1.77 meters in height, which is somewhat low for the discipline.

He is the only human being to have surpassed the psychological barrier of 9 meters in the specialty in a valid jump on the board, but not an official record, due to favorable wind.

It was in March 1995, at the Pan American Games in Mar del Plata, at sea level, where he jumped 9.03 with wind.

In 1995 he achieved the gold medal at the World Athletics Championship in Gothenburg (Sweden), with a jump of 8.70 meters. That same year, in a competition in Sestriere (Italy), he achieved a jump of 8.96 meters, surpassing Mike Powell's world record by one centimeter; this jump was surrounded by controversy, since initially the wind recorded by the anemometer made the jump valid to be recognized as a world record, but after an investigation by the International Athletics Federation, it was decided to annul the record, since at the moment of the jump there was a judge in front of the anemometer obstructing the real wind measurement.

He repeated the gold medal at the World Athletics Championships in 1997 in Athens (Greece), and in 1999 in Seville (Spain), finishing ahead of Yago Lamela.

He had to wait for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games (Australia) to achieve his first Olympic gold medal with a jump of 8.55, surpassing Australian Jai Taurima by a narrow margin of 6 centimeters. At the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games, he finished fourth behind Carl Lewis, Mike Powell and Joe Greene, and at the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games he did not participate as he was recovering from an injury.

At the 2001 World Athletics Championship in Edmonton (Canada), he achieved another gold medal with a jump of 8.40 meters, totaling four gold medals in world championships and one Olympic gold medal, to which must be added his five gold medals at the World Indoor Championships, becoming one of the best athletes in the history of the specialty.

His performances in 1995, 1997 and 2001 earned him recognition as the best athlete of the year in the survey by the Latin American News Agency Prensa Latina.

It was the culmination of a career rich in world awards, nine, five indoors (Toronto-1993, Barcelona-1995, Paris-1997, Maebashi-1999 and Lisbon-2001) and four outdoors (Gothenburg-1995, Athens-1997, Seville-1999 and Edmonton-2001).

After his retirement from active sports, he worked as a coach for Frenchman Teddy Tamgho, who broke the indoor world record in triple jump three times, in Doha, Qatar in 2010, with 17.90 meters; a year later, he did so first in the French city of Aubiere, with 17.91 and then in Paris, on March 6, 2011 at the European Athletics Championship (17.92) as well as becoming the third man to surpass 18 meters outdoors.

For the Rio 2016 Olympic Games he was the coach of Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas, who won the silver medal in the triple jump specialty.

He also collaborates with the sports project Atletismo Alicante, an athletics school run by coach Sergio García Berbegal in charge of bringing the Olympic king sport closer to young people and accompanying them throughout their sports careers, when his responsibilities as coach of his international athletes permit.