The athlete says she left behind tobacco, kimonos and some belongings and boarded a train.
14ymedio, Havana, September 7, 2026 — From the moment she boarded the flight that would take her to France, along with 14 other judokas as part of the training process, Melissa Hurtado knew it would be the last trip she would make with the Cuban team. “I already knew I wasn’t going to return,” the athlete says in videos posted to her Instagram account. More than three years after that January 21, she says that “this story was not easy.”
The woman maintains that the abandonment by Cuban athletes abroad is a story that “has no end.” In the first quarter of that year, 20 competitors took advantage of trips abroad to escape. Most significantly, among that group, led by Olympic medalist Idalis Ortiz and under the direction of Yordanis Arencibia, the judokas Vanessa Godínez (48 kilograms), Santa Virgen Romero (78 kg), Blanca Elena Torres (52 kg) and Lutmary García (63 kg) also defected in Paris.
According to Hurtado, the plan was to slip away after participating in the Paris Grand Slam. However, she learned that her teammate Vanessa Godínez also wanted to flee. They had to coordinate their plans and take advantage of their stay in Amiens, which was not easy.
“You couldn’t talk about that because you don’t know who is who, or whether someone is an informant who is going to tell the coach,” the judoka recounts. She had just won the gold medal after defeating Switzerland’s Fabienne Kocher at the European Judo Open in Australia.
According to Hurtado, the plan was to slip away after participating in the Paris Grand Slam. However, she learned that her teammate Vanessa Godínez also wanted to flee
An acquaintance coordinated Hurtado and Godínez’s escape. According to her account, he warned her that if she did not do it, after her teammate left, everything “was going to get ugly.”
The woman recalls that on the day she defected, she left behind boxes of cigars that she had brought to sell and make some money on the Island, and later learned that “the coaches kept them.” The kimonos and some of her belongings “were divided up among the girls, and they did the right thing.”
She experienced tense moments on the day of the escape because her roommate, who knew nothing about it, would not fall asleep. “We left in the early morning,” she says, “without speaking French and without our suitcases.” Hurtado recalls that they walked for about 30 minutes to a train station. “There was a train leaving for Paris at 6:00 in the morning. It was bitterly cold.”
They boarded the train without knowing, “We didn’t even pay for the train. We didn’t know. If an inspector had caught us, they might even have fined us,” the athlete recounts.
The officials in charge of the training camp realized that the athletes had fled in the morning. “The FBI” (as she refers to the Cuban security agents) “broke down the door of the other girls who were left on the team.” They intimidated them “by saying that there was a group that had stayed” with them.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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