With his best outdoor mark, high jumper Luis Enrique Zayas finishes fourth at the World Athletics Championship

August 23, 2023

High jumper Luis Enrique Zayas came close to the podium at the World Athletics Championship tournament in Budapest, Hungary, with a jump of 2.33 meters, which constitutes his best mark of the season.

The Pan American champion from Lima 2019 was not among the favorites, in a competition where the main podium candidates were Qatari Mutz Essa Barshim, champion in London 2017, Qatar 2019 and Oregon 2022 —who ultimately won bronze in this edition—; American JuVaughn Harrison, holder of a 2.35-meter mark this year, who surpassed him in this tournament by one centimeter to finish second, and Italian Gianmarco Tamberi, who shared the Olympic gold with Barshim in Tokyo 2020 and now took the title in Budapest 2023.

Other serious podium contenders were South Korean Sanghyeok Woo and Ukrainian Andrii Protsenko, silver and bronze in Oregon.

Zayas arrived at this final with a personal best of 2.31 m, achieved last June and a qualifying round that raised many doubts about his performance in the final. Cuba's representative accumulated several misses and needed ten jumps to be among the 13 finalists.

Also in this outcome he had misses on his first jumps at accessible heights. However, when the bar was set at 2.33, a mark he had only cleared indoors and which constitutes his best historical result, the Cuban performed the takeoff of his life and managed to clear it.

With this mark, Zayas moved into fourth place and improved on the sixth place he achieved in the previous edition, from which Cuba departed without medals for the first time since participating in these championships.

The other representative from the Island who competed in a final on this day of the World Championship was discus thrower Slinda Morales, who last June made a throw of 65.06 m that constituted a personal best and gave her direct entry to Budapest.

However, in this event she failed to come close to that mark and was even below the 62.76 m throw from qualifying.

She could only throw the discus to 62.31 m on her first attempt and failed to improve the mark on her subsequent throws.

This competition was dominated by American Laulauga Tausaga-Collins, who on her second-to-last attempt threw the implement to 69.49 meters, surpassing her teammate and favorite Vallarie Allman (69.23), who until then was leading the event, and China's Feng Bin (67.18).

For Cuban Morales, who will turn 23 in a week and has already won at the recent Central American and Caribbean Games, obtaining her direct ticket to the World Championship and qualifying for a final is a great result.

Morales became the first figure in Cuba's women's discus throw after the departure of Denia Caballero last June.

The world champion in 2015 and runner-up in 2019 followed in the footsteps of her former teammate Yaimé Pérez, who in July 2022 left the Cuban delegation that went to the Oregon World Championship.