Cuba's wrestler Mijain Lopez waves as he leaves at the end of the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024. GETTY IMAGES

The Cuban delegation in Paris is back on home soil. They were first received by President Miguel Diaz-Canel at Havana airport. This was followed by a party and a concert on the Malecón. Mijain Lopez was the main attraction after winning his fifth gold medal at Paris 2024.

61 Cuban athletes went to Paris 2024 to participate in 16 Olympic sports. The delegation brought back to Cuba two gold, one silver and six bronze medals. Wrestling was the star sport, winning five of the nine medals.

The hero of the hour is Mijain Lopez. It is the first time that an individual athlete has won five Olympic gold medals in the same event. A sporting feat that Lopez has achieved at the age of 41.

After retiring with four gold medals, having also achieved success at Tokyo 2020, Lopez already had an enviable career. Apart from those four Olympic medals, he already had five golds and three silvers at World Championships and another five golds at Pan American Championships.

He changed his mind. He ended up coming back and conquering once more. That is why he was the star of the reception for the Cuban delegation in Havana. First the welcome at the airport by the president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, and also the presence of his mother, Leonor. He is no longer just one of the great figures of his country's sport, but an Olympic legend.

His medal was in Greco-Roman wrestling, category -130kg. Yusneylis Guzman won a silver medal in wrestling -50 kg. Three bronze medals were won by Luis Orta in -67kg, Gabriel Rosillo in -97kg and Milaimy Marin in -76kg.



Lopez's was not Cuba's only gold medal in Paris. Erislandy Alvarez was champion in the -63.5 kg boxing category. He was the other main athlete during the reception. In the same sport, in -80 kg, Arlen Lopez won bronze.

Cuba's other two medals were bronze medals. One was in another contact sport, taekwondo. Rafael Alba came third in the +80 kg category. The other was for Yarisleidis Cirilo in the C1 200m sprint canoeing, where she was 23 hundredths of a second short of silver and 24 hundredths of a second short of gold.

With this result, Cuba was thirty-second in the Paris medal table. The island nation's glory days in the Olympics are far behind her. In Barcelona 1992, Cuba was fifth in the medal table with 14 golds, six silvers and 11 bronzes, behind only the Russian Unified Team, the United States, Germany and China. Since then, their luck has faded somewhat. Nevertheless, in Lopez it has one of the greats of history.