Jorge HERNANDEZ PADRON

Jorge Hernández won the light-flyweight (-48kg) gold medal at the 1974 Central American and Caribbean Games at Santo Domingo just three months after his 19th birthday. Later that year, Cuba dominated the inaugural World Amateur Boxing Championships on home soil, winning five gold medals, with Hernández capturing his second major title in nine months when he was in some auspicious gold-medal-winning company like Wilfredo Gómez, Howard Davis, Emilio Correa, Mate Parlov and Teofilio Stevenson. Hernández continued winning on the international stage, as well as capturing national titles, by adding the light-flyweight gold at the 1975 Pan American Games in Mexico City, and at Montréal in 1976, he won the ultimate prize, the Olympic gold medal. Beaten in the final at the 1978 Worlds in Beograd, Hernández failed to win a second Olympic medal in 1980 when he lost to the eventual runner-up, Viktor Miroshnychenko in his first bout. Hernández retired from boxing in 1980 but returned to the sport to take up coaching in 1991, until his eventual retirement in 2016, when he worked at Cuba's National Boxing School.