The Olympic champion Dayron Robles confessed this week that when he joined the national youth teams in Havana, his big dream wasn't to win medals: it was to get a pair of shoes.
This was revealed in a reel published on her Instagram account, where she humorously and nostalgically recounted the material hardships that shaped her early days in high-performance athletics.
«Do you know what my biggest dream was when I went to the national youth teams in Havana? It wasn't to have a medal or anything like that, it was to have a pair of sneakers», began the athlete from Guantanamo, born in 1986 and regarded as the greatest hurdler in the history of Cuba.
Faced with the inability to obtain conventional sports shoes, Robles and his team came up with a handmade solution: they took their spikes—the specialized shoes used in track athletics—removed the sole, and a neighbor found them the sole of an old pair of sneakers, which they took to a cobbler to have it sewn on.
"And the shoemaker stitched them up for me. I was strutting around with great flair. I was wearing the latest sneakers. There was no one who could say anything to me: I had the same ones that cost you 100 or 150 dollars, the ones you had sent to the United States," he recalled with laughter.
The result of that improvised engineering lasted through an entire summer of volleyball, basketball, and street races, until the shoes were, in their own words, "shot."
But the story didn't end there. During his first formal training with the national team, Robles had to face a 500-meter test wearing black Reebok boots that would come undone with each step.
"They were slipping when I reached the curve, and when I came out of the curve, with just 100 meters left, I was skating," he described, recalling the scene with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.
The testimony of the hurdler is not an isolated case. Material insecurity has been a constant in Cuban sports that other athletes have also reported.
The pitcher Aroldis Chapman recounted in 2020 that when he played baseball in Cuba, due to a lack of sports equipment, he would ask for gloves, spikes, and other gear from players on other teams, often international ones that he had defeated on the field.
In 2025, wrestler Mijaín López publicly acknowledged the crisis in Cuban sports due to emigration, the deterioration of facilities, and a lack of materials. That same year, power outages and food shortages further exacerbated a situation that the government itself had recognized in 2022, when it admitted that more than half of the country's sports facilities were in poor condition.
Despite this context, Robles reached the pinnacle of world athletics. On June 12, 2008, in Ostrava, he set the world record for the 110-meter hurdles with a time of 12.87 seconds, surpassing the mark set by the Chinese athlete Liu Xiang. Weeks later, at the Beijing Olympic Games, he won the gold medal with a time of 12.93 seconds.
His achievements also include two gold medals at indoor World Championships and a silver medal at the 2004 Junior World Championship. He retired in 2013 and has since been living in El Cotorro, Havana, dedicating himself to agroecological farming and hospitality business ventures.
"I share those experiences because they truly are part of each person's growth," Robles concluded in the video, inviting his followers to share their own stories of overcoming challenges.
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