A few hundredths of a second used to make or break Ana Guevara. Now, she’s just hoping to break 90 during a few hours on the golf course.
The former world champion and Olympic silver medalist in the 400m dash will lend her name to the Ana Guevara Cup, a pro-am golf tournament that will be held in Cuba from Oct. 13 to Oct. 17.
It will bring as many as 140 Mexican participants to Varadero, a resort of white-sand beaches and sparkling, clear-blue surf east of Havana that has the country’s only 18-hole golf course.
“I’m back and doing something new, a sport that almost no one knew me for,” the 33-year-old from northern Mexico said on Sunday at the Varadero clubhouse on a bluff overlooking the ocean.
It used to be known as “Xanadu,” an 11-bedroom mansion built by US chemical tycoon Irenee DuPont.
Guevara said she had never picked up a club until 2003, when her trainers ordered her to take a month-long break from sprinting. She said the game left her with soreness in muscles she didn’t know she had.
“I played 18 holes, three days in a row. I almost couldn’t move afterward,” she said. “But I was comfortable ... I picked it up quickly.”
Since retiring from track and field, Guevara sometimes plays twice a week. She has lowered her score from 120-plus to the low 90s and said she thinks she will shoot 89 or better before long.
That’s already a lot better than the brief attack on the links by Cuba’s more famous Guevara, Che. Accompanied by former Cuban president Fidel Castro and wearing combat boots, he managed a 127 on a par-70 course in Havana in 1961, then abandoned the game forever.
The sprinter said it took her time to warm to the game.
“It seemed very boring to me. Actually, I didn’t even think it was a sport,” she said. “But it required great concentration, great technique.”
Guevara was a world champion in the 400m in 2003 and won bronze in the event at the world championships in 2001 and 2003. She took silver at the Athens Olympics in 2004, but retired abruptly in January 2008, when many had expected her to compete at the Beijing Games.
Her longtime trainer is Cuban Raul Barreda and she said that she traveled to the island so much while working with him that lending her name to the Varadero tournament is like “returning to my roots.”
“I hope this can be the vehicle that opens doors for this sport in Cuba,” Guevara said.
In May, Cuban Minister of Tourism Manuel Marrero said the government had approved construction of residential projects linked to resorts — possibly opening the door for villas that could one day ring oceanfront golf courses.
However, he gave no details about whether Cuba would allow tourist developments that include residences owned by foreigners.
While Castro long dismissed golf as a sport of the rich, Cuba has said it would like to build 10 more 18-hole golf courses around the country. It has yet to break ground on any projects, however.
Lavish golf tourism does not easily equate with the egalitarian society Cuba has sought to build, but tourism revenues have dropped in recent years due to the global economic crisis, leaving officials scrambling for new sources of revenue.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier