Havana, May 6 (ACN) -- The three Cuban teams participating in the World Athletics Relay Championships, based in the Bahamas, left without tickets to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
In the women's 4x400 meters (m) race there were the greatest hopes of reaching the quota, but she finished third in heat two and that possibility disappeared.
The debutant Melissa Padrón, and the Silesia 2021 world champions, Rose Mary Almanza, Lisneidy Veitía and Roxana Gómez, reached the finish line with a time of three minutes (min), 29 seconds and 36 hundredths, improving their record of the present season.
On Saturday, the Cuban quartet stopped the clocks at 3:31.56 min, which was their highest mark so far this year, although it was not enough for them to be included among the finalists.
On Sunday, ahead of the island's representatives were the Dutch (3:27.45 min) and the Swiss (3:28.30 min), who guaranteed two places in the second heat at the Parisian summer event, according to the World Athletics official site.
Also for the Caribbean nation, the 4x100 m relays, in both sexes, were far from achieving the objective of qualifying for the competition under the five rings in the French capital.
Among the ladies, Laura Moreira, Jocelyn Echazabal, Yarima García and Yunisleydis García, winners of the gold medal at the 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago de Chile, finished fourth in heat two with a time of 44.05 seconds (s).
This record is the best for them in the current 2024, but it was not enough for them to enter the finish line as one of the first two.
In that race, the two leading positions were occupied by the Jamaicans (42.74 s) and the athletes from Trinidad and Tobago, who took over the Olympic tickets to Paris.
Moving on to the men, Reinaldo Espinosa, Edel Rogelio Amores, Yaniel Carrero and Shainer Reginfo, silver medalists in the continental multi-sport event in Santiago de Chile, only finished seventh in the first heat with 39.39 s.
That mark was more discreet than the 39.00 s achieved on Saturday by the Cuban sprinters.
After the 14 Olympic places awarded in each modality, the only option left for the island's relays to be in Paris 2024 is to reach one of the two remaining places by ranking. There are only two tickets left in each modality.
In some interesting events, Botswana took advantage of the absence of the Americans in the 4x400 meters for men and took over the throne with a mark of 2:59.11 minutes, led by the stellar Letsile Tebogo, 20 years old and double medalist at the World Cup in Budapest 2023.
The United States teams dominated the 4x100 meters in both sexes, in addition to the women's and mixed 4x400 events.
In the mixed, second place went to the Dutch quartet, led by the stellar Fenke Bol, while the hope of Latin America, the Dominican Republic, came fifth, highlighted by the stellar Marileidy Paulino and Anabel Medina, students of Cuban Yaseen Pérez Gómez .
