Afghan, Iranian, and Saudi women compete at Paris Olympics 2024 amid ‘gender apartheid’ at home

For female athletes from countries with grim track records on women’s rights, deciding on whether to represent your country can be a fraught decision.

Since the last Olympics, held in 2021, both Afghanistan and Iran have seen fresh and heavy blows to the rights and freedoms of women and girls in the country, including athletes.

Amnesty International recently called for “the institutionalized and systematic domination and oppression of women, girls and LGBTI people” in both countries to be recognised as “gender apartheid.”

Former athletes from both countries have even called for the Afghan and Iranian national teams to be barred from competing at the upcoming Olympics altogether.

In Saudi Arabia, increased state interest in women’s sports appears to have borne fruit with the rise of a Taekwondo star – but is this new state interest a sign of real change for women in the country?

Afghanistan: Athletes in exile 

After seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban were quick to reverse progress made for women and girls, including athletes.  

In the months that followed, gyms and other sports facilities were closed off to women and girls, and Taliban representatives employed intimidation tactics to scare women away from sports.

They made threatening phone calls to female athletes telling them to stop training, and even raided their homes.

Taliban sports officials have claimed that women and girls will be allowed to practice sports again once more female-only facilities are established but have said that they cannot afford to build and maintain such sites.

The hardline group has effectively snuffed out girls’ and women’s sports in the country, and many female athletes fled.

Despite this, women athletes will still be representing Afghanistan at the Olympics.

Under a system to ensure that all 206 nations participate in the games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected six Afghan athletes to represent the national team in Paris – three men and three women. 

All but one of these athletes currently live and train abroad.

Two of the three women are sisters; both sisters are cyclists.

Growing up in a remote part of Afghanistan, Fariba and Yoldoz Hashimi were used to threats from men for their pursuit long before the Taliban seized control of the country.

However, as the hardline group seized more and more territory, the Hashimi sisters’ situation looked increasingly precarious.

During the exodus of Afghans from the country when the Taliban took Kabul, they secured evacuation to Italy, where they received the professional coaching they were never able to access in Afghanistan.

The sisters have hailed their selection for the Afghan national team as an achievement for all women in the country.

“This belongs to Afghanistan women,” Fariba told the BBC after being selected for the team. “I am going to the Olympics because of them.”

Also participating as part of the Afghan team is sprinter Kimia Yousofi, who also fled the Taliban in 2021 and is currently based in Australia.

“I represent the stolen dreams and aspirations of these women. Those who don't have the authority to make decisions as free human beings,” she said via the Australian Olympic Committee earlier this month.

Though all three women have expressed their pride in representing Afghanistan at the Olympics, some of their peers think the country should not be present at the games while the situation for women and girls there is so dire.

Judoka Friba Rezayee was one of two women to represent Afghanistan at the 2004 Athens Olympics. That was the first time that Afghanistan was being represented by female Olympians.

Rezayee has been outspoken in her criticism of the IOC’s handling of Afghanistan’s presence at these games and has called for the team to be banned.

“By allowing them to compete for Afghanistan, the IOC is not only undermining its commitment to Olympic values but also lending legitimacy to the Taliban’s unrecognised regime,” she said in an opinion piece for The New York Times published earlier this month. 

The IOC has defended its decision to allow for an Afghanistan team to compete at the Games, saying that the Afghan National Olympic Committee (NOC) team at the Olympics “is not a team associated with the de facto Taliban authorities of the country.”

“Since the Taliban regime seized power in 2021, the IOC has continued to recognise the Afghan NOC elected before the regime change in the country, and to communicate with its leadership.”

Asked by The New Arab what it was doing to help women and girls in Afghanistan regain access to sport the IOC said that it “has been in continuous dialogue with the Afghan NOC and the Afghan sports authorities, with the aim of overturning the current restrictions on women to access and practice sport.”

No Taliban officials will be accredited for the Games, the IOC said.

The Taliban have laid no claim to the women athletes representing the national team.

“Only three athletes are representing Afghanistan,” sports directorate spokesperson Atal Mashwani was reported as saying earlier this month.

“Currently in Afghanistan girls’ sports have been stopped,” Mashwani said. “When girls’ sport isn’t practised, how can they go on the national team?”

Iran: ‘But one of millions’

Eleven women are set to represent Iran at the Olympics as part of their national team – more than at any other Olympics.

Dress and modesty codes that oblige women athletes to cover their hair and body limit the range of sports Iranian women can take part in if they want to represent their country.

The oppression used to enforce dress code in Iran was again brought to worldwide attention when a young Kurdish woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, was fatally beaten in Iranian police custody for wearing her hijab “improperly,” sparking nationwide protest. These protests were of course but one of many waves of public dissent to hit Iran in recent years.

Iranian athletes too protested the killing and the oppressive system that enabled it, using the platforms that international sports competitions gave them to air their anger.

Among them is sprinter Farzaneh Fasihi, who at the Asian Indoor Championships in Kazakhstan last year said to the camera after her victory: “For the people of Iran. For the happiness of the people of Iran!”

She bowed her head on the podium, did not bear the Iranian flag, and stayed silent during the national anthem. Despite this, and the limited funding and other backing she gets from the Iranian state, she continues to run for her country.

Other women athletes have defected entirely from the Iranian team, instead representing the Refugee Olympic Team or other countries they now call home.

The country’s only female Olympic medallist to date, Kimia Alizadeh, won bronze at the 2016 Olympics. She left Iran in 2020, saying in an Instagram post at the time that she had been “but one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran”.

She was part of the Refugee Olympic team at the Tokyo Olympics, before joining the Bulgarian team in time for the Paris Olympics.

Last year, as Iran still reeled from the fallout of Amini’s killing, Iranian dissidents including former athletes urged the IOC to ban Iran from the 2024 Olympics – or at least prevent Iranian men from competing in disciplines that their women counterparts cannot take part in, including wrestling, boxing, swimming, and sailing.

Refugee Olympic team: A ‘second family’

Established during the “refugee crisis” of the mid-2010s, the Refugee Olympic Team has been a sanctuary for athletes from countries torn apart by war – or, in the case of Iran, where political dissent comes with dire consequences. 

More than half of the 36-strong Refugee Olympic team are either Iranian or Afghan.

Among them are the Afghan women athletes breakdancer Manziha Talash, judoka Nigara Shaheen, and road cyclist Masomah Ali Zada – who is also the chef de mission for the team this year.

Ali Zada has ties to both Afghan and Iranian, having been born in Afghanistan and spending some of her childhood in Iran, where she learned to cycle. She has since claimed asylum in France.

A wealth of Iranian female talent can be found in the Refugee Olympic team, including taekwondo athlete Dina Pouryounes Langeroudi, badminton player Dorsa Yavarifava, teen weightlifter Yekta Jamali Galeh, and canoeist Saman Soltani.

Saudi Arabia: Progress, or sportswashing?

Three female athletes will be representing Saudi Arabia at the Paris Olympics – among them the first Saudi to qualify for the Games by merit.

Taekwondo fighter Donia Abu Taleb, 27, qualified for the Games at the 2024 Asian Taekwondo Championships in Vietnam in May, where she won the gold medal in the under-49kg category.

Playing a relatively obscure sport at a time when women's and girls’ participation in sport was not widely encouraged, Abu Taleb started by disguising herself as a boy in order to practice.

It was her father who put her on to the sport, and her father who encouraged her to persevere through those difficult early years.

“He always supported me. When I’d say that I wanted to quit, he’d say no, don’t stop,” Abu Taleb said in a recent interview.

She has been given state backing, with high-calibre coaches from overseas hired to train her in her quest to win gold. 

Two other Saudi female athletes will compete at the Games, thanks to invitations from the IOC. They are 17-year-old Mashael Ayed – who will compete as Saudi Arabia’s first women swimmer at an Olympics – and sprinter Hibah Mohammed.

The Gulf kingdom has in recent years relaxed its restrictions on the rights of women in the country, including on their participation in sports.

The Saudi Olympic Committee said last year that there had been a huge jump in the number of women registering as athletes, and the country is bidding to host the 2035 Women’s World Cup.

The Saudis could lean on a strong performance from Abu Taleb to prove that it is moving towards some semblance of gender equality and becoming a hub for both men’s and women’s sports.

But in a country where women are still being handed long jail sentences for charges related to clothing choices and online self-expression, critics say that the push to become more of a force in the sporting realm is simply an attempt to gloss over the state’s abuse of women’s rights and freedoms.

Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. She was previously a staff journalist and news editor at The New Arab