Iran’s Only Woman Olympic Winner Who Fled To Germany Wants To Compete As A Refugee At The Tokyo Olympics
Iran’s only female Olympic medalist Kimia Alizadeh, who defected from Iran, will under white flag for the Tokyo Olympics.
Kimia Alizadeh, Iran’s only woman Olympic medal winner, has been granted refugee status in Germany and will compete in the European qualification tournament as a taekwondo player for the Olympic Refugee Team for the Tokyo Olympics.
Alizadeh won a bronze medal in taekwondo at the Rio 2016 Olympics at the age of 18 and fled to Germany in Jan. 2020. She had several offers to compete for the Netherlands, Canada, Belgium and Bulgaria, according to Reuters.
Alizadeh said she chose to defect from Iran because she was sick of the the government using her achievement as “a propaganda tool.”
“I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran whom they’ve been playing for years,” she wrote on her social media at the time.
“I wore whatever they told me and repeated whatever they ordered. Every sentence they ordered I repeated,” she said. “None of us matter for them, we are just tools.”
“Taekwondo changed my life,” she told Reuters, “When I got a medal, I was the first athlete in Iran and, after that, all the people knew me and … that was hard.”
She has since become Germany’s third refugee athlete after the German Taekwondo Union’s president had contacted the interior minister over her refugee status last summer.
Currently, the 22-year-old lives in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg and has been training with her husband for the European qualification tournament, which is to take place in the Bulgarian capital Sofia from May 7 to 9.
She is aiming to join the Olympic Refugee Team, whose members will be picked in June.
“Now, everything is okay. The important thing is that I can have my personal life and my sports life together,” Alizadeh said, according to Reuters.
