Juan Miguel Echevarría will be one of the athletes to follow at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

March 6, 2021

Cuban athlete Juan Miguel Echevarría will be one of the athletes to watch at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

A long jump specialist at just 22 years old, he already boasts an impressive collection of awards. He was world champion in indoor track in 2018 —which was his debut at an absolute World Championship—, won bronze at the Doha World Championships in 2019 and, that same year, gold at the Lima Pan American Games. Additionally, he has been the winner in four Diamond League competitions.

In short, Juan Miguel Echevarría will undoubtedly be one of the great contenders for a podium finish at next summer's Games.

At this moment he leads the world rankings for 86 weeks, according to World Athletics rankings, and in the three competitions he has participated in during 2021, he has achieved a clean sweep of victories. In fact, he has not dropped from first place in any competition since 2019 and from the podium since 2017.

A world record to break
Such expectation has been created around Echevarría in recent years that many have already predicted that he will surpass Mike Powell's world record in long jump, which has been in effect since 1991 with a mark of 8.95 meters. A record, by the way, that the legendary American track and field athlete achieved at the Tokyo Stadium.

Three decades later, young Echevarría has in his legs the capacity to —at least— dream of surpassing Powell. "Achieving this mark [breaking the world record] is a big task, but I don't see it as impossible," he said in 2019 for World Athletics.

At this moment, his personal best is 8.68 meters, and it is the 11th best long jump mark of all time.

However, in Stockholm and also in 2018 he made a jump of 8.83 meters, something that no one had achieved since 1995 under any conditions, although it is true it was invalidated due to a tailwind of more than 2 meters per second.

He even surpassed this mark —although also invalidated due to wind— with an impressive flight of 8.92 meters in March 2019 in Havana, during the Cuba Cup competition.

But to surpass Powell's record, Echevarría first will have to beat the best Cuban mark in all of history; the one achieved by another legend, Iván Pedroso (8.71), in 1995.

After an undefeated indoor track season, what awaits Echevarría in the second part of the year is expected to be impressive.

And his main objective is the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, which he will reach with one more year of experience after the postponement.

"The only important thing now is to comply in order to defeat the coronavirus. Tokyo is not going to slip away. A year later I will arrive with more eagerness," Echevarría said for EFE following the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games to 2021.

That 'eagerness' calls for achieving a clean sweep of victories in 2021. After being crowned again in his last competition in Madrid, which also marked the end of the 2020 World Indoor Tour, he acknowledged for EFE: "I always go for first place and I hope to arrive in optimal form in Tokyo."

On Echevarría's horizon are the Games of next summer. The long jump final will be held on August 2, 2021 at the Olympic Stadium in a city where thirty years ago Mikel Powell achieved the world record in this discipline.