Alberto Gallardo Alvarez Athlete
Alberto Gallardo Alvarez (born June 25, 1962) is a Cuban athlete and former olympian in the sport of sailing. Also known as Alberto Gallardo, he was the youngest competitor for the Finn class at the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. Born and raised in La Playa, Matanzas, Cuba, he became a national sensation for displaying, since a young age, an unsurpassed talent in sailing, specifically on the Finn class. He passed all the qualifying events and dodged a number of elimination races or regattas, against known and established national competitors, before being informed that he was, according to the national rankings, the sole qualifier, who would represent Cuba on Sailing at the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in the Finn class, which would be held in Tallinn, USSR. During the event at the 1980 Summer Olympic Games Finn competition, he successfully finished all the races. Albeit a disqualification on the first regatta, which set him back on the overall rankings, he was able to finish among the best ten Finn competitors in the world during the second race. Throughout the rest of the event, he exhibited, despite the disqualifying race which affected his overall punctuation ranking, the same athletic performance that "El Lobo de Mar" was known for.