Wrestler Yasmani Acosta (36 years old, Cuba) has made history in Chilean sport by securing a new medal for the South American country’s delegation at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The athlete qualified this Monday for the final of Greco-Roman wrestling in the 130-kilo category, after beating Chinese Lingzhe Meng in a strategic fight. The final for the gold will be this Tuesday and he will face Cuban Mijaín López, one of his friends – and also his greatest rival – on the world wrestling circuit, who has won four consecutive gold medals since the 2008 Beijing Games.
Acosta began his day by beating Bulgarian Kiril Milov in the round of 16, with a score of 1-1, in which he had to score the last technical point. In the next phase, the Chilean showed off his experience and beat Egyptian Mohamed Abdellatif 2-1. The semi-final found him with the representative of China, one of the references of the specialty in Asia, whom he also beat with a tight and tense fight that ended 1-1, but which was unbalanced by being the last to score. In all his fights he started at a disadvantage and knew how to recover until he scored the strategic point.
The Cuban-born athlete will have to compete for gold on Tuesday against López, whom he has known since his years as a representative on the Caribbean island. Acosta, who was one of the notable representatives of wrestling in his native country, was relegated to a secondary role against a López who gained prominence. Yasmani himself acknowledged that this was one of the motivations for migrating to Chile, a nation where he stayed after participating in the 2015 Pan American Championship. “I didn’t go to the Olympic Games because they only sent one person per country and there went Mijaín, who is a three-time Olympic champion and has five world titles. He is the best in the world. There, I came after Mijaín. I trained with him every day for nine years,” said the wrestler in an interview with the Chilean news website. Emol in 2018.
Yasmani Acosta competes for the Team Chilethe selection of Chilean Olympic athletes, since 2017. The following year, the Chilean Congress approved the project that granted him citizenship by grace. From then on, he wore the colors of the Chilean flag in world and Pan American championships. He participated in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, where he almost won a medal by finishing fifth, which ultimately earned him the Olympic diploma.
The historic medal for Chile
Whether gold or silver, the medal secured by Yasmani Acosta is historic. The fighter is Chile’s 15th medallist at the Olympic Games and will appear as the third representative of a combat sport to climb onto a podium after boxers Ramón Tapia, Carlos Barrientos and Carlos Lucas, who won a silver and two bronze medals, respectively, at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.
Acosta’s medal is the second one obtained by the Chilean team in Paris. Last Sunday, the shooter Francisca Crovetto made history by winning a gold in skeet shooting. Crovetto was the first woman to win the Olympic title for Chile. In addition, with these two medals secured, Chile will come close to the extraordinary harvest achieved at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, when tennis awarded three medals (gold in doubles for Nicolás Massú and Fernando González; gold in singles for Massú; and bronze in singles for González).
here to the EL PAÍS Chile newsletter and receive all the key information on current events in the country.
