Javier Sotomayor Sanabria is currently the world high-jump record-holder (and has been for the last five years), as well as Olympic (Barcelona 92) and World Champion (Stuttgart 93) in this athletics event.

Born in October 1967 in Limonar (Matanzas, Cuba), this young athlete is the charismatic representative of a whole new generation of Cuban sportsmen and women who are astounding the world.

At the age of fourteen, when he was surpassing jumps of two metres, he began his specific preparation for high-jumping, moving to Havana with a grant from the sports Training College which allowed him to advance considerable in his training.

Sotomayor became Junior World Champion by 1986, in Athens, and the record which he set then (2.36 m) is still intact. Despite being forced not to attend the Seoul Olympics by Cuba´s boycott, he made his class quite clear the following year, triumphing in the Budapest World Championships, where he cleared 2.43, and in Puerto Rico, where he jumped 2.44 outdoors. This record held until, in 1993, he managed to surpass, in Salamanca, 2.45 m.

He is the second coloured athlete to set a world record in the high jump, after the American John Thomas (1960), and the second Cuban athlete to set a world record, after Alberto Juantorena (over 400 m, in 1976).

Javier Sotomayor found himself forced to stay away from competition from September 1989 and May 1990 a the result of a foot injury. Nonetheless, when he did reappear, he did so to win a gold medal at the Caribbean and Central-American Championships, held in Mexico. At the Barcelona Olympic Games he took the gold medal. He confessed that this made up for five years of continual adversity. In July 1993 he broke his own world record in Salamanca, with a jump, at the second attempt, of 2.45 metres.

With a height of 1.94 m and weighing some 82 kg, he may add to his personal worth as a sportsman his ever outstanding personal values -simplicity, kindness, openness to all and companionship- which have made him into a real myth for the youth of his country. Regarding Cuba, he has declared that there, "we athletes are privileged [...]. I will never leave Cuba to never return and, furthermore, I am committed to getting Cuba back on its feet."

He has been distinguished with various awards, such as that of Best Male Athlete in the World in 1988 (from the Spanish Association of Sporting Press), Best Male Cuban Athlete, and Most Outstanding Latin-American Athlete (by the Cuban news agency "Prensa Latina").