POTENTIALLY the world's best triple-jump athlete has been given Spanish nationality – just in time, hopefully, to represent his new country at the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Jordan Alejandro Díaz Fortun, who will turn 21 in three weeks' time, was born in La Habana, Cuba, winning a gold in 2018 at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a silver at the Pan-American Games the following year in Lima, Perú, as part of the national team for his native island nation.
Jordan in 2018, his best year so far and one which multiplied his medal collection (photo: Olympics.com)
He also won the World Youth Championships in 2017 in Nairobi, Kenya and, the very next year, won the World Under-20 Championships in Tampere, Finland, the NACAC Championships, and a silver medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in Barranquilla, Colombia.
Jordan's personal best in long-jump is 17.49 metres (57 feet, four-and-a-half inches) and in high-jump, 1.85 metres (6'1”) - exactly his own height.
As a junior, he broke the record for the under-18 world longest jump in the 2017 Championships, at 17.3 metres (56'9”), but was a senior when he beat this personal best at the Pan-American Games in 2019, achieving his as-yet unsurpassed 17.49 metres in Camagüey, Cuba.
Last year, whilst competing in an Olympic qualifier in Castellón (Comunidad Valenciana) on Spain's east coast, Jordan abandoned his national team and stayed behind in Spain, meaning he knowingly lost his slot at the Tokyo 2020 Games due to take place in summer 2021.
He would almost certainly have returned to Cuba with a medal, but walked out at the airport ahead of the tournament.
Jordan was not the only Cuban to desert his national team – three baseball players and the team psychologist deliberately missed their plane home from Miami, and basketball player Raudelis Guerra, from Guantánamo, purposely failed to get on a connecting flight from Madrid's Barajas airport, all between June and early July 2021, according to reports at the time in the Diario Las Américas, Diario de Cuba and the Periódico Cubano.
After his departure from his compatriots, Jordan made contact with Ana Peleteiro, bronze medallist in triple-jump at Tokyo 2020, and explained his case.
Ana, 26, was born in Ribeira in the Galicia province of A Coruña to, in her own words, a 'Galician mother and an African father', neither of whom she has never met, and was adopted by a local family as a child.
A rôle model for young black Europeans, Ana's trainer is Cuban-born Iván Pedroso, and she took a special interest in Jordan's situation, recounting it to National Sports Council (CSD) chairman José Manuel Franco.
She asked him for support in getting Jordan a Spanish passport and in pushing the interior and justice ministries to speed up the process as much as they could.
Along with Ana, Jordan has been training with Iván Pedroso in Guadalajara for the last two months – joined by fellow triple-jumpers Héctor Santos, Yulimar Rojas, Fátima Diamé, Tessy Ebosele, Alexis Copello and Changzhou Huang.
As a result of Jordan's contacting Ana and her help in making contacts, the young Cuban now has joint nationality – Spanish, but without having to renounce his citizenship of birth – and should be just in time to represent Spain at Paris 2024.
Athletes are required to have been a national of the country they represent for three years before doing so, meaning that as long as his application was formally accepted back in July last year, he will just squeeze in before heading for the French capital.
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