Javier Sotomayor Sanabria, born October 13, 1967 in Limonar is a Cuban athlete, specialist in high jump. The 1992 Olympic champion and the six-time world champion (twice outdoors and four times in the arena), is the current world record holder in the discipline with 2.45 m, which was set at the meeting in Salamanca on July 27, 1993. He is also the record holder in the indoor world, jumping 2.43 m in 1989.
Regarded as the greatest high jumper of his time, the Cuban surpassed the bar more than 2.40 m twenty-one times, and he exceeded the height of 2.35 m 89 times. He made seven of the top ten outdoor jumps of all time and four of the top ten indoor jumps. During his eighteen-year career at the highest level, he was eight times at the top of the IAAF rankings and eleven times he was among the top three jumpers of the year.
Suspended for two years by the International Federation of Athletics (IAAF) after testing positive for cocaine in 1999, Javier Sotomayor received a half-sentence for "exceptional circumstances". January 2002, when he just retired from the sport, on a test conducted in July 2001. He was suspended for life from all competitions. In 2015, he was naturalized to be Spaniard
At the start of the 1999 season in Maebashi, Sotomayor won his fourth gold medal at the World Indoor Championships, making him the most successful athlete in the competition. He wins the competition with a distance of 2.36 m and is ahead of the Russian Vyacheslav Voronin 46 in terms of the number of attempts. He won a new national title in May and won at the Gaz de France meeting in Paris-Saint-Denis early in the summer with 2.34 m ahead of Voronin and Forsyth. ten On July 30, 1999 in Winnipeg, Canada, the Cuban won the Pan American Games title for the fourth time in a row, climbing 2.30 m. However, on August 4, a press release from the Pan American Games Medical Commission reported that Javier Sotomayor was tested positive for cocaine47. Shortly after the counter-expert opinion confirming the proven doping of the Cuban, the IAAF decided to withdraw his gold medal and suspend him from all sports competitions for two years, i.e. July 31, 2001. Backed by Fidel Castro, head of the Cuban government and Alberto Juantoren, president of the Cuban Federation of Athletics, and after a long In the legal battle waged by Cuban sports organizations, Javier Sotomayor sees that on August 2, 2000, his sentence was reduced to one year for "exceptional circumstances" 48 so that he could participate in the 2000 Summer Olympics. According to international authorities, these exceptional circumstances take into account the career of the Cuban and the fact that in fifteen years, at the highest level, the latter passed three hundred doping tests, all negative49.
He returns to the necklaces on August 15, 2000 at the Montauban rally, winning the competition with a distance of 2.28 m, and then winning at the Herculis rally in Monaco with a distance of 2.30 m 7. In Sydney, he participated in his third consecutive Olympics, the Cuban missed the 1984 and 1988 due to a boycott. He qualified for the finals with 2.27 m jump, Javier Sotomayor established on 24 September 2000 his best jump of the year at 2.32 m, finishing second in the competition behind Russian Sergey Klyugin (2.35 m) and ahead of Algerian Abderrahmane Hammad (2, 32 m) 50. In early 2001, Sotomayor only finished fifth in the World Indoor Championships with 2.25 meters, six centimeters less than his season record set two weeks earlier in Athens. After returning to Cuba, he won his twelfth and final title of outdoor champion on May 27 in Havana. In August, he takes part in Edmontonna's sixth World Championships, below the podium with a distance of 2.33 m, which is the same height as the Russians Vyacheslav Voronin and Yaroslav Rybakov, took 51 silver medals. He ended the 2001 season by winning a 2.31m match in Yokohama, a few days after crossing the 2.35m mark in Somosko. tenOctober 11, 2001, a few days before his thirty-fifth birthday, Javier Sotomayor announces that he is ending his career as an athlete at 52. ten November 25 international bodies confirm information from a Spanish radio station about a positive test for nandrolone by a Cuban athlete, conducted on the occasion of a meeting in Tenerife July 14, 200153. On January 10, 2002, the IAAF confirms the Cuban athlete's doping and decides to suspend him for life from any competition
