The only female athlete to win an Olympic medal for Iran announced this weekend she had defected from the nation because of “hypocrisy, lies, injustice and flattery” and said she had been used as a “tool.”
Published : 13 Jan 2020, 07:10 PM
The Olympian, Kimia Alizadeh, 21, announced her decision in an Instagram post accompanied by a photo from the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, where she won a bronze medal in taekwondo.
“They took me wherever they wanted,” she wrote. “Whatever they said, I wore. Every sentence they ordered, I repeated.”
Her comments came during a time of especially heightened tensions in the country after Iranian authorities announced this weekend that the country’s forces had unintentionally downed a passenger plane last week near Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. The admission prompted outrage in the country and set off a series of protests over the weekend.
While Alizadeh’s statement did not refer to her country’s geopolitical troubles, she did address the “oppressed people of Iran” and pointed to restrictive policies on women’s public conduct and appearance, including the “obligatory veil.”
Alizadeh did not say where she was seeking asylum. But Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency reported that Alizadeh had moved to the Netherlands and noted that she had been absent from training for several days before releasing her statement.
The Iranian news outlet also reported that Alizadeh planned to compete in this summer’s Olympics in Tokyo but noted that she would not represent Iran.
The president of Iran’s Taekwondo Federation, Seyed Mohammad Puladgar, said his organisation and the Olympic Committee had “made every effort to support” Alizadeh and said the foreign media’s depiction of the situation was “simply false, unfair and untrue.”
Alizadeh said that she had embarked on a “difficult path” but that she “didn’t want to sit at the table of hypocrisy, lies, injustice and flattery.”
“This decision is even harder than winning the Olympic gold,” Alizadeh wrote, “but I remain the daughter of Iran wherever I am.”
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