It is 1,000m to the finish line at the flatwater sprint canoeing course, but the man in lane three of the second heat has come a hell of a lot further than that to make it there.

If you were paying close attention during Tokyo 2020, you may remember Fernando Dayan Jorge Enriquez. If you are Cuban you absolutely do. He won the country’s first gold medal in canoeing, when he was competing with Serguey Torres in the two‑man 1,000m sprint.

The win turned Jorge into a national hero. Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president, came to congratulate them and Granma, the official paper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, carried several long, lavish reports, describing it as a “Cuban Feat” and an “Electrifying Victory”. He was picked as one of the country’s athletes of the year.

It was a great race. The Cuban pair trailed China and Germany all the way to the final few metres, when they pushed past into first. Torres, 34, gave all the credit to Dayan Jorge, who was 22. “This boy gave me the desire to fight,” he said. “He has put his hand on my shoulder and told me: ‘Come on, you can.’ This young man is destined to become one of the great Cuban athletes, and a super hero of world canoeing.”

There was talk in the papers about how the national federation were going to build a team around him for Paris and Los Angeles and plans to pair him with another up‑and‑coming Cuban canoer called José Ramón Pelier Cordova. Pelier Cordova made it to Paris with the Cuban team. But Dayan Jorge didn’t. He is here competing for the Olympic Refugee Team.

It is hard for Dayan Jorge to talk about why. He doesn’t speak much English and he has to measure his words carefully. He has talked about how, when he returned to Cuba after the Olympics, the country was in the worst economic crisis since the revolution and how unhappy he felt at being made to play at public relations for a failing government.

“We had six months of vacation and I lived like all Cubans, I was no longer in the bubble of sports,” he said in an interview. “They also wanted to make me part of the government’s farce and I didn’t want to. That’s why I deserted.”

Six months after the Tokyo Games, Dayan Jorge and the rest of the Cuba squad travelled to Mexico City for a three-week training camp. In all the hustle-bustle of the airport, Dayan Jorge slipped away from his teammates and coaches and disappeared towards the US border.

It took him a fortnight to make the journey. He left his gold medal, and everything else, behind him in Cuba and travelled incognito because he was worried about the risk of being kidnapped and held for ransom if one of the people‑smuggling gangs found out he was an Olympic champion.

Finally, he reached the Rio Grande. He had to swim across and, fit as he is, he says he only just made it. Dayan Jorge’s first real step on to US soil was followed by another right back the way he came. He heard a woman screaming in midstream behind him. She was holding on to a rope and her husband was trying to pull her to shore, but the current was so strong that she let go. Her husband was chasing after her, but she was moving too quickly for him to catch up. Dayan Jorge went back in to rescue her. He confirmed the story after his race with a simple “yes, that’s true”.

On the far bank, Dayan Jorge was arrested and held for a fortnight by the US authorities before he was granted asylum. He wound up in Miami, where he is working as a plumber and doing his training on the canals around the city. He is one of almost half a million Cubans who have made this journey, or another just like it, in the years since the end of the pandemic.

He had no idea whether he was going to be able to compete in Paris until he found he had been awarded an IOC refugee scholarship in April. “I feel proud to be able to represent more than 100 million displaced people around the world,” he said. “I feel very proud to be able to represent this flag.”

There has been a cost. When he first defected, Granma published a terse statement from the National Federation that accused him of “serious indiscipline that destroyed years of intense work and aspects of the development strategy of that sport towards the Olympic cycles of Paris 2024 and Los Angeles 2028”. It said he “has turned his back on the commitment to his sport and his people”. He laughs when I ask if his old friends and teammates have been warm towards him here in Paris. “No.”

The Cuban Olympic Committee has complained to the IOC about his inclusion. It says he is not a refugee at all, that he was never persecuted or uprooted, but simply chose to leave. It has demanded the IOC expel him, and accused him of making “disrespectful and fallacious political statements against his country, his people and the sports movement that allowed him to be Olympic champion in Tokyo 2020”.

Dayan Jorge did not make it to the semi-finals here. But he says he is already dreaming about competing in Los Angeles four years from now. He is a proud man and like Torres, his friend and teammate in Tokyo said when they won that gold, “a very brave one” too.