La Cruz crowned Cuba's first light heavyweight Olympic champion
Xinhua, August 19, 2016 Adjust font size:
Cuba's Julio Cesar La Cruz, triple world champion in the 81-kilograms category, won the gold medal in the boxing tournament at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday, giving him the only medal he had been missing.
La Cruz, World Amateur Championship winner in Baku, Azerbaijan-2011, Almaty-Kazakhstan and Doha, Qatar-2015, defeated Kazakhstan's Adilbek Niyazymbetow in the final by unanimous vote. The fight took place in the Riocentro Arena's Pavillion six.
The Caribbean athlete was born in 1989 in the eastern Cuban province of Camagüey, around 500 kilometers east of Havana and from a young age he shone in the ring.
At six-years-old La Cruz already had a clear idea of his sporting vocation and at this young age he began to dabble in boxing. At 18, he competed for a place in the Beijing 2008 Olympics but was unsuccessful.
The first significant result in the 1.65-meters-tall boxer's career was in the light heavyweight category at the World Amateur Championships in Baku, where he took home the gold and repeated this event during the next two occasions.
La Cruz also scepters from the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, 2011, and Toronto, Canada, 2015, as well as in the Central American and Caribbean Games held in Veracruz, Mexico, in 2014.
The boxer's fighting involves good reflections and large body movements which have helped him to gain the nickname "the Shadow."
Due to his performance, he was selected by the American Boxing Confederation as the best fighter on the continent in 2011 and 2013.
La Cruz is currently experiencing the reverse of what happened at London 2012 when he was eliminated in the quarter finals, despite arriving as one of the favorites of the tournament. Instead of letting this discourage him, he actively began to look for more fights in order to gain more experience with the aim of "retaliating" at Rio 2016 and taking home the medal missing from his sporting career.
And he succeeded. At 27-years-old and under the direction of coach Raul Fernandez, the boxer and captain of the Cuban boxing team left no room for doubts. He won all four of his fights by unanimous decision.
"Throughout history, Cuban boxing has been the flagship of the island and is the sport that always brings most medals for the country. We hope that in Rio it stays that way," said La Cruz before stepping foot in the ring for the final.
La Cruz is the first Cuban man to win a gold medal in the light heavyweight category at the Olympics. Endit