By NAN Sports Writer
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Dec. 17, 2015: Cuba’s world pole vault champion Yarisley Silva has been named the 2015 North Central American and Caribbean Athletics Association (NACAC) Athlete of the Year.
Silva’s win comes on the heels of her first world outdoor title to the indoor gold she won in 2014. She also topped the world lists with a Central America and Caribbean record of 4.91m and successfully defended her Pan American Games title in Toronto.
Silva, 28, of San Luis, Pinar del Río, has had many firsts in her career. She was the first Latin American athlete to win the silver medal at the 2012 Summer Olympics and the first Cuban woman to reach a world class standard in the pole vault.
Her personal bests of 4.90 m (16 ft 03⁄4 in) outdoors and 4.78 m (15 ft 8 in) indoors are the Cuban and Central American and Caribbean records for the event.
The top NACAC junior athlete honors went to Jamaica’s Christopher Taylor, who claimed the 400-m gold at the IAAF World Youth Championships Cali 2015 and Cuba’s Yulenmis Aguilar, who set a world junior javelin record of 63.86m at the Pan American Junior Championships in Edmonton.
