Did she defect to the United States? Or did something bad happen to her that we still don’t know about? Yurisel Laborde is a Cuban judoka who won a bronze medal during the 2004 Olympics in Athens. She also boasts of two Judo World Championships gold medals which she bagged in 2005 and 2007.

After winning a gold medal during the 2008 Pan American Judo Championships in Miami last week, Yurisel disappeared. Pretty mysterious, eh?

Maybe the “family-style atmosphere” within Cuba’s sports program which we blogged about earlier, isn’t as enticing as the greener pastures of the good old US of A?