Inside Afghan Women’s Fight to Compete at the Olympics

For women and Girls in Afghanistan, life has become one big “no.”

Children after the sixth grade are not allowed to go to school. Travel is not allowed without a male guardian. “Moral crimes” such as adultery are punishable by stoning. In most places, women must cover themselves from head to toe if they leave the house. Sports are banned.

When the Taliban retook control of the country in 2021, the regime quickly imposed severe restrictions on women’s rights, erasing decades of hard-won gains. One of the first steps was to ban women and girls from accessing sports, claiming that such activities would “expose” their bodies. “Female athletes became targets for revenge,” says Mara Gobowan, founder of the nonprofit Equality League, which has helped evacuate and resettle dozens of female athletes.

But some Afghan women are finding ways to “challenge the Taliban’s tyranny,” says Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. “Female athletes have shown incredible resilience by evacuating themselves and rebuilding their national teams in soccer, cricket, and other sports.”

Among the athletes who have taken their stand are three women now representing Afghanistan at the Paris Olympics — cyclist sisters Fariba and Yoldoz Hashimi, who now live in exile in Italy, and runner Kamia Yousufi, who lives in exile in Australia. The team is completed by three men, two of whom are also in exile. They carry the former Afghan flag; Taliban officials are not allowed to attend the Olympics.

But not everyone is in favor of an Afghan Olympic team. Fariba Rezai, one of the first two Afghan athletes to compete in the Olympics in 2004, claimed in a recent article: The New York Times The editorial says the International Olympic Committee should ban the Afghan team from competing, to show its appreciation for human rights. It believes Afghan athletes should compete only on the Refugee Olympic Team, which represents displaced people around the world. (Five Afghan athletes are currently on that team as well.)

rolling stone Samira Asghari, the first Afghan woman to join the International Olympic Committee and an athlete who played for the Afghan national basketball team before the Taliban took power, spoke about her personal journey as an athlete, the importance of women’s sports in Afghanistan, the administration of the Games, and life for women under the Taliban.

Your journey into the Olympics has been an interesting one. Your family fled Afghanistan in 1994 – the year you were born – to escape conflict and instability as the Taliban gained prominence. You ended up in Iran, where you started playing sports as a child, right?
Yes, when I was in Iran, I went to martial arts and kung fu classes. Then I started water swimming when I was five years old. I played soccer, skateboarding and many sports.

Did your mother encourage you to exercise?
Yes, yes. I grew up with three boys, so I was always playing with them. My father was a taekwondo coach in Afghanistan. When my parents left the country, it was not safe anymore; there was a lot of discrimination against different races, and restrictions for both women and men. We became refugees.

Your family later returned to Afghanistan, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban. That must have been a strange experience for a young girl.
We came back from Iran in 2003, when I was nine years old. I went, as I say, from heaven to hell. Imagine you are in a battlefield: all the buildings are destroyed, no clean water. Pollution, poverty, dry weather, no trees, nothing. Not even a single swimming pool. Nothing. It was crazy.

I remember when I was a teenager, 13 or 12 years old, I started wearing my Converse All Star sneakers in public, to show that women and girls had the right to play sports, because there was such a stigma in Afghanistan. Women didn’t dare wear sneakers or even carry a backpack, because Afghanistan had been under the Taliban for the past few years, so schools were closed. Women still wore the burqa; the Taliban didn’t exist, but women still wore it because it had become normal.

Have you ever faced backlash for going out in your sneakers?
Of course, we heard bad words, insults from men, from young boys. They would harass us. But I knew that it was up to us, the young generation, to change, and it took all this emotional and psychological energy. As I walked through the streets of Kabul, in my sneakers, backpack and school uniform, I tried, in my mind, to say to myself: “Samira, as a young girl in Afghanistan, you have to normalize this. It’s a shock to the people, but you have to normalize it.” I started riding my bike down a dusty street, not on the main road, but on my home street. As an individual, I started to advocate for this path.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up to adults who say, “You can't do this.”
Uneducated adults – people who don’t know how to talk to a woman or how to treat a woman or a little girl. And I would like to emphasize that women in Afghanistan and their supporters suffer psychologically as a result of all this; for example, for us athletes, we were fighting in two places: competing on the field, and also off the field in society, on the cobblestone streets, fighting for our rights.

Sometimes I hear from Afghan women that this is Afghan culture, or this is Islamic culture, and I say this is not our culture, this is not what Islam says. Islam says that education is for men and women. It is not about religion, it is about the norms that you create in your society. People create these norms. As an individual, I wanted to normalize something else, which is sports and education.

You fell in love with basketball, eventually becoming captain of the national team, and beginning your journey to the International Olympic Committee.
Yes, I started playing with the national youth team in 2009. A few years later, when I turned 18, my coach gave me a birthday present to join the senior team. In 2011, I became a member of the Afghan National Olympic Committee, and then the International Olympic Committee in 2018. I played basketball until the Taliban came to power in 2021.

Where were you when the Taliban took power?
I was pursuing my Master of Advanced Studies in Sports Management and Technology in Switzerland.

It must be devastating to see the news.
I saw videos of the Taliban holding their guns in downtown Kabul. Then I heard about people falling out of the wings of planes trying to flee the country. I didn’t believe it; I thought it was a joke. But then I saw the video and I was so sad. I said I have to do something because I’m safe. What about my teammates, who were like sisters to me? We grew up together. I spent more time with my teammates and athletes in Afghanistan than with my family, since we played on the national team together. So I put my research paper aside, and that year I didn’t celebrate my graduation; how could I celebrate my graduation when everything is forbidden for women in Afghanistan?

I started reaching out to athletes; I was hearing not only from the sports community in Afghanistan, but also from people from other backgrounds—social activists, civil activists, who were reaching out to me to see if I could help, because I have connections all over the world as an IOC member. It was overwhelming. I started helping the Equality League and other international organizations evacuate athletes. I was working and working and working all the time. I also had to do my job as an IOC member, which is a huge responsibility. My family also had to leave the country; they moved from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, and now they’re in France.

I still have the trauma that I was going through. I'm sure a lot of what's going on in my mind is still from our conflict with the Taliban. And now, with this Olympics, you see all the other countries, even Saudi Arabia, encouraging sports for women. You see all the countries encouraging sports, and then I see my country.

Olympic teams must include both women and men. So how did officials manage to put together a gender-balanced team of Afghan athletes to represent the country?
Olympic athletes are always selected by national sports federations — the governing bodies of different sports in each country, like gymnastics in the United States, for example. They then submit rosters to the national Olympic committees. So the Afghan national sports federations selected Afghan athletes for the team, then sent the roster to the Afghan National Olympic Committee — which operates in exile — and worked with the IOC and other sports bodies to bring women and men to the Paris Olympics from the countries where they currently live. We now have the largest Afghan delegation ever — three women and three men. We also have five Afghans competing on the Refugee Olympic Team.

What is your response to the argument that Afghan athletes should not be on an Olympic team representing Afghanistan, in a show of support for human rights?
What I think is that first and foremost, we do not allow the Taliban, or the Taliban flag, in the Olympics. No country or UN body has accepted the Taliban’s legitimacy to govern, largely because of discrimination against women. The International Olympic Committee banned Taliban officials from the Paris Olympics. We allow the tricolor, which is the flag of Afghanistan, the old flag. Millions of Afghans still love the old flag. And it’s not just about the flag, it’s about freedom. We can show the Taliban that if you don’t allow women to represent themselves, to show the world that they exist and that they are passionate about sports, then we have this platform. So, in my opinion, it’s useful today for the Afghan people to represent Afghanistan with this flag. The IOC can show women that we support you and your rights as athletes.

My message is that sport has given me more than I could have ever asked for, providing me with many educational and professional opportunities. I call on the international community, not just the Taliban, to support Afghanistan to restore the human rights to education and sport for 20 million women and girls.

Olympic athletes are an inspiration to young Afghan girls, who face unimaginable obstacles.
Yes, I met with the Afghan Olympic athletes this week and I said to them, “We support you. All Afghans, especially the younger generation, look up to you as an example, and you are the representatives of the country – the ambassadors of peace from Afghanistan. You will be the hope for the Afghan people and the younger generation to show resilience and continue the effort as we have done.” And to go back to what I said earlier, it was very difficult to wear sneakers on the streets, but we had to start somewhere.