Roberto Balado

[Chopping Right]

Had he not died tragically in a car accident in 1994 I wonder what Roberto Balado could have gone on to achieve? I believe his death ended a run of 56 unbeaten fights including 3 Worlds golds (1989, 91, 93) and an Olympic gold in 1992. He was also the Val Barker trophy winner for best boxer at Barcelona that year. He was a little younger than Felix Savon I think, and was clearly better than the Cuban super-heavyweights that followed him, so he would almost certainly have been at the 1996 and 2000 Games, and would have been even more experienced by that time. He would have been retired by now, but perhaps as one of the greatest amateurs ever with 3 Olympic golds and 6 or 7 World golds?

[locoxelbox]

Balado was tremendous. What a handspeed and footwork for a super heavyweight. He would've been too fast for Klitschko and too tough for Harrison.
What a tragedy...

[Chopping Right]

I found this moving excerpt about Balado's death while browsing the web. It's taken from a very good Sports Illustrated piece on Cuban sport. The full article is at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/events ... cuba2.html.

The summer of '94 was the worst in memory. The sugar harvest was plummeting to its lowest level in decades. Tourists tossed around money as Cubans rationed their eggs, rice, patience. Families cracked. More defectors than ever headed to the seawall, armed with inner tubes and wood. Some put on flippers and stepped into the water and started swimming; others simply hijacked the nearest boat and pointed it north. By the end more than 33,000 had gone. The summer of '94 shook even the party faithful: In early August violence spread from the waterfront to Old Havana as antigovernment protesters clashed with security forces -- the first riots in the capital since the revolution. A cop was seen on TV, blood running down his face.

In the midst of this desperate tangle, at 6 a.m. on July 2, Roberto Balado grew impatient at a train crossing. He jerked his steering wheel, passed an idling school bus, edged onto the track. He had never seen a train here, not in 10 years. His favorite band, Pablo and His Elite, played on the cassette deck. Eight hours later, Balado, the reigning world and Olympic super heavyweight boxing champion, was dead at 25.

"He'd driven me to the boxing gym and gone off on some personal business, and on his way back he was killed", says Ariel Hernandez, Balado's best friend of 11 years and a two-time world-champion middleweight. The last thing he said was, "Wait for me. I'm coming back."

Not since 75 Cubans, including the entire male and female national fencing teams, died in a plane crash in Barbados in October 1976, had Cuba's sports community suffered such a loss. But Balado's stature transcended boxing: He had won 56 straight matches, including the gold medal in Barcelona, and like all world-beating sports figures he was adored by Cuban socialists and dissidents alike. The news was barely reported in the U.S., but it shook Cuba like an earthquake. "It was a national tragedy", says Juantorena. "He was very much loved. Charismatic, very simple. Everybody took it hard.''

But few, perhaps, harder than Hernandez, who grew up with Balado in La Lisa, who copied Balado's work ethic, who listened when Balado chided him for partying too much and taught him how to be a good husband. Hernandez adored Balado's way of deflecting attention -- how he gave his medals away and how, when some fan said, "That's Roberto Balado'', he would respond, "No, just Roberto.'' Hernandez was bathing when someone told him there'd been a crash. "I went crazy,'' he says. "I started running toward the scene. But when I got there they were taking him away.. . .''

With a friend Hernandez pedaled to Balado's modest, recently awarded home. Balado's wife, Dulce Monteagudo, was asleep when she heard knocking on the door. Hernandez was soaked with sweat. When they got to the hospital, Roberto was conscious; he told Dulce about the train. The bus had blinded him, he said; the train cracked right through the driver's door.

He'd broken six ribs. One was digging a hole in his lung. "He asked me to take him home because he felt fine,'' Dulce says. "But I could hear it in his voice: He wasn't fine. He was gasping.'' Still, Roberto was so big and so strong that when attendants couldn't lift him onto a stretcher to go get X- rays, he wrenched his body off the bed and got on the stretcher himself.

Roberto and Dulce had been a couple for eight years. She loved to watch him box; he would come home from a match disappointed if he hadn't heard her screaming advice from the stands. "This was a disaster for me,'' she says now. "Three years earlier I'd lost my baby [in a miscarriage], and now I lose him. And when he died, I'd had some symptoms of pregnancy. I think I lost a child again.'' At this she leaves the room. When she returns, she says, "I tell you: I lost a friend and a great man, apart from a husband.''

It is uncanny, how strong she seems. "Don't believe it,'' she says. "Since he died, my spirit has shrunk.''

The funeral was held on a Tuesday. Juantorena and boxing legend Teofilo Stevenson and thousands of others came to the ceremony at Havana's Cristobal Colon Cemetery. Balado was buried in the Pantheon of Sportsmen. The coffin was made of bronze; a Cuban flag lay on top. The Central Committee of the Communist Party sent a wreath. On the headstone Dulce placed a picture of Roberto wearing a medal, with a Cuban flag on his shoulders, but rain has washed the image away. She says she will never watch boxing again.

Since Balado's death, much has changed in Cuba. The regime seems to be edging, glacially, toward a market economy; ordinary Cubans can now shop, with dollars, at open-air bazaars where farmers sell food according to supply and demand. Not far from the overpass that reads SPORT DIGNIFIES MAN, a billboard pushes UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON. No Cuban athlete defected at the Pan Am Games in Argentina. Everyone says life has gotten slightly better, but tension remains: No one is sure whether Castro will abruptly backtrack. No one knows if the regime can survive his death, or if he will ever die. No one can say there will be no more rafters. Or riots. Everybody waits.

Not long after the funeral, a truck pulled up to Dulce's house towing Roberto's white Lada. When there is a fatal accident in Cuba, the family is responsible for the wreck. So Dulce cleaned out the car herself, ejecting the tape, pulling out Roberto's little decorations, his bagful of boxing gear. "It was his, and it's mine now,'' she says of the demolished vehicle. "I keep it at a neighbor's house.''

Now Dulce is out the door and walking down the sidewalk in the dark, past one house. She stops at the next. The sound of TV floats through the window; the nightly news is just beginning. Dulce knocks, asks for the garage to be opened. "I need another car because it's a long ride to the cemetery,'' she says. "I've kept this because I keep thinking they'll replace it.'' But she hasn't been told a thing.

The garage door yawns open, groaning. The overhead light is so dim. In the stillness Balado's Lada -- another gift from Fidel -- resembles something savaged by a giant claw. The driver's door, shredded into three thin slices, hangs by a black strap. The hood, flipped upside down, sits on the engine. There is no windshield. License plate number 69549. Dulce stands outside in the night, looking in.

"A disaster of life,'' she whispers.

Everybody waits.