Waldemar Font: Cuban World Champion in Amateur Boxing
Waldemar Font Quintero is a Cuban former amateur boxer who competed as a flyweight. He won the 51 kg title at the 1993 World Championships in Tampere.
Font also won the flyweight gold at the 1994 Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg. That result was later annulled: the International Amateur Boxing Association said drug tests showed Font and fellow Cuban gold medalist Manuel Mantilla had taken the banned diuretic furosemide. Font was stripped of the medal and suspended.
World championship success in two divisions
Font’s 1993 title run included a 15–5 win over Azerbaijan’s Lernik Guseinov and a 12–3 victory against Kazakhstan’s Bektas Abubakirov. He also defeated the Dominican Republic’s Hector Ávila 11–8. The Tampere tournament records show the sequence of wins behind his championship, rather than simply the final medal position.
He later competed at bantamweight, the 54-kilogram category. At the 1997 World Championships in Budapest, Hungary, Font advanced to another world final and finished with silver. Russia’s Raimkul Malakhbekov won that championship bout. Font’s earlier campaign had included a 20–6 victory over Algeria’s Abdelaziz Boulahia, as recorded in the 1997 results.
Those two championship appearances give his competitive career a broader timeline: a flyweight world title in Finland, followed four years later by a world silver medal in a heavier division. Both results came in international amateur tournaments, where Font represented Cuba against national-team opponents.
Sources
Sources: 1993 World Championships results; The Washington Post report on the 1994 test results; Los Angeles Times report on the Goodwill Games final.
Career records and reporting: amateur-boxing.strefa.pl.
Tags
Boxing, Boxing History
