Las Tunas.- In the world of sports some paths are straight and others take unexpected curves to reach their final goal. The story of Reiter Téllez Velázquez is that of an athlete who changed the map and the compass for the bow and arrow, and since then he has not stopped sowing triumphs for Cuba.
It all started two blocks from the Julio Antonio Mella stadium, the scene where this journalist’s recorder crossed paths with one of the best archery coaches in our country.
At just 12 years old, sport became the natural landscape of Reiter’s life. “That’s why I like baseball, coming here when I’m in Las Tunas and there’s a game. My athletic career was wide and diverse. I practiced fencing and wrestling, until I found my way in orienteering, a discipline that combines the resistance of cross country with the skill of using a map and a compass.
“I was an athlete on the national team for five years and a three-time Cuban champion until, in 1994, the sport was eliminated from the Cuban system, for not being Olympic. Luckily, a friend had the audacity to invite me to be an archery coach. I arrived at the Higher School of Athletic Improvement (ESPA) in Las Tunas as an ‘Indian’,” he says jokingly, “because neither I nor my students mastered the discipline in depth. But we did not give up.”
His baptism as a coach in a national competition, in 1995, indicated the path to follow. “I realized that what I saw with the boys here in the province had nothing to do with what was really happening. That was my impulse to start asking, worrying and really interested.”
He rejected proposals to move to other disciplines or positions. “My thing was to work, I wanted to train athletes” and with that idea in his mind he started from scratch with the school category, then youth. He studied in a training course in Havana and, with patience, began to see the fruits.
“In 1996, with the athlete Julieta González Botello, I managed, for the first time, for a Las Tunas archery player to be among the eight finalists at the national level. In 1998, the first medals arrived for the province, a silver and a bronze in the School Games. The following year, 11 medals. In that same calendar we achieved a national champion and I was recognized as the Best Coach of Cuba.”
In 2002 his team reached the podium for the first time in the national youth event, as runners-up to Cuba. “We were one point away from first place. It was something very beautiful. Those successes had a bittersweet flavor, achieved against all odds, because we did not have arrows, we did not have bows. It was Luis Daniel del Risco, one of the great architects of being able to have the first resources in archery in Las Tunas.”
His talent as a leader crossed borders. From 2002 to 2004 he worked in Mexico, in a state that occupied the last national places. Under his direction, the team climbed to eighth place in the Mexican National Olympics, obtaining the first medals for that state.
In 2007 the first big call came, to work with the national youth team in Sancti Spíritus. “There I began to forge the career of Hugo Franco, with whom I won three youth titles and three national records, qualifying for the Pan American Games in Guadalajara. It was a beautiful moment with a dedicated athlete.
“After my return to Las Tunas due to personal problems, in 2011 I took on a new challenge with the senior women’s national team. With this team I won three medals – one silver and two bronze – at the 2018 Central American Games in Barranquilla.
“I have been directing the senior men’s national team since 2022. It has been a nice experience, but the work is difficult, the resources we have achieved have been ‘lungless’.
“A vivid example of this fight was the bronze medal at the Central American Games in San Salvador 2023, because before starting to discuss the medals our goal was broken. The solution came from sporting solidarity, an athlete from Colombia lent us a set of equipment. We started to discuss the medal, but the equipment was not adjusted, Hugo did not have the sights yet until he was able to pick it up, we had not had enough time to attach it. That medal, won against all odds, tasted like gold.
“The path has not been free of pain, we have mourned the loss of family members finding ourselves minutes away from a competition, we have cried; but we continue our mission, which is always, to aspire to bring a medal home.”
HOW DOES COMING HOME FEEL?
Reiter does not hide his roots. “I really like being here, I still have my wife here, my brother and my neighborhood. I love baseball, they know it. I carry the Las Tunas sports movement in my heart. I took my first steps as an athlete, as a coach and I think there is still a lot to do, perhaps there is not much left to go as a coach, but there will always be the desire to return to the land. I, at least, am well rooted in Las Tunas.
“My competitive dreams are still intact. I long for an Olympic medal, a world medal, a Pan American medal that I don’t have with the team, but I think we are going to achieve it in this next cycle, I have athletes with the potential for that,” he says with the same faith that led him, decades ago, to transform lack into opportunity.
