There are still 1,000m to go to the finish line of the flatwater canoe sprint course, but the man in lane three of heat two has come a long way to get there.
If you were paying attention during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, you may remember Fernando Dayan Jorge Enriquez – and if you’re Cuban, you certainly do. He won the country’s first gold medal in canoeing when he competed with Serguey Torres in the two-man bobsleigh 1,000-meter sprint.
The victory made Jorge a national hero. Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, came to congratulate them, and Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, ran several long, detailed reports, calling the victory a “Cuban feat” and an “electrifying victory.” He was chosen as one of the country’s athletes of the year.
It was a great race. The Cuban duo trailed China and Germany until the last few meters and then moved into the lead. Torres, 34, gave all the credit to 22-year-old Dayan Jorge. “This boy gave me the will to fight,” he said. “He put his hand on my shoulder and told me: ‘Come on, you can do it.’ This young man is destined to become one of the greatest Cuban athletes and a superhero of canoeing around the world.”
The newspapers said that the national federation for Paris and Los Angeles wanted to build a team around him and pair him with another up-and-coming Cuban canoeist named José Ramón Pelier Cordova. Pelier Cordova made it to Paris with the Cuban team. Dayan Jorge, however, did not. He is competing here for the Olympic refugee team.
Dayan Jorge finds it difficult to talk about the reasons. He doesn’t speak much English and has to choose his words carefully. He has spoken about how when he returned to Cuba after the Olympics, Cuba was in the worst economic crisis since the revolution and how unhappy he was at being forced to play PR for a failing government.
“We had six months of vacation and I lived like all Cubans, I was no longer in the bubble of sport,” he said in an interview. “They also wanted to make me part of the government’s farce and I didn’t want that. That’s why I deserted.”
Six months after the Tokyo Games, Dayan Jorge and the rest of the Cuban team traveled to Mexico City for a three-week training camp. In all the commotion at the airport, Dayan Jorge slipped away from his teammates and coaches and disappeared toward the U.S. border.
The journey took him two weeks. He left his gold medal and everything else behind in Cuba and travelled incognito because he was afraid of being kidnapped and held for ransom if one of the human smuggling gangs found out he was an Olympic champion.
Eventually he reached the Rio Grande. He had to swim across and, fit as he is, he said he barely made it. Dayan Jorge’s first real step on U.S. soil was followed by another one back the same way he came. He heard a woman screaming behind him in the middle of the river. She was holding on to a rope and her husband tried to pull her to shore, but the current was so strong that she let go. Her husband chased after her, but she was moving too fast for him to catch up. Dayan Jorge went back into the water to rescue her. He confirmed the story after his race with a simple, “Yes, that’s true.”
On the other side, Dayan Jorge was arrested and held by US authorities for two weeks before being granted asylum. He ended up in Miami, where he works as a plumber and is completing his apprenticeship on the canals around the city. He is one of nearly half a million Cubans who have made this or a similar journey in the years since the pandemic ended.
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He had no idea if he would be able to compete in Paris until he learned in April that he had been awarded an IOC refugee scholarship. “I am proud to represent more than 100 million displaced people around the world,” he said. “I am very proud to be able to carry this flag.”
That comes at a price. When he first defected, Granma published a terse statement from the national federation accusing him of “serious indiscipline” that had “nullified years of intense work and aspects of the sport’s development strategy for the Olympic cycles of Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028.” It said he had “turned his back on his commitment to his sport and his people.” He laughs when I ask him if his old friends and teammates have been cordial to him here in Paris. “No.”
The Cuban Olympic Committee has complained to the IOC about his admission. It says he is not a refugee at all, he has never been persecuted or uprooted, but simply decided to leave the country. It called on the IOC to expel him, accusing him of making “disrespectful and false political statements against his country, his people and the sports movement that allowed him to become Olympic champion in Tokyo 2020”.
Dayan Jorge did not make it to the semifinals here, but he says he is already dreaming of competing in Los Angeles in four years. He is a proud man and, like Torres, his friend and teammate in Tokyo, he said when they won the gold, “a very brave man.”
