Afghan sprinter Tahmina Kohistani shows what’s possible for Muslim women

By Mike Wise, Friday, August 3, 2:35 PMThe Washington Post

LONDON —

On your mark . . .

The petite woman in the Islamic headscarf nestled into the starting blocks, all 5-foot-3, 115 toned pounds of Tahmina Kohistani’s frame. She looked straight toward the finish line in the 100-meter preliminary heat on the first day of track and field at Olympic Stadium.

Such a short distance, she thought. Just 100 more meters and it would all go away. The abuse: the men watching her train in Kabul, heckling her to go home, “to get behind the man;” the taxi driver who kicked her out of his cab when he found out she was training for the Olympics.
One more sprint of less than 15 seconds, this time in front of 60,000 people who boomed with applause as her name was called over the stadium’s loudspeaker, and Kohistani would complete the longest of journeys for the shortest of races.
“How is this possible?” someone had asked the only woman to represent Afghanistan in London.

Set …
For a moment before the starter’s gun went off, she thought hard on that.
How is this possible? How is someone from a war-ravaged country who trains in a dilapidated stadium, who can’t afford elite sprinter’s footwear allowed to be here, at the 2012 London Games?
How is a nation with remnants of radical Islamism, where a woman accused of adultery was shot to death by the Taliban an hour from the capital last month, able to produce an independent-thinking female athlete to compete against the world’s greatest sprinters?
When stars of their respective Olympics sports check their Facebook and Twitter accounts for messages of hope, encouragement or congratulations from fans and supporters back home and abroad, they usually feel instantly validated. Before it was removed, this was on Kohistani’s Facebook account Friday afternoon:
“You are shame to Muslim women. You don’t represent [them] you represent Tahmina.”
As much as she became a symbol of women’s empowerment – as much as Brunei, Qatar and Saudi Arabia sending female athletes to the Olympics for the first time had finally made these a genuine gender-inclusive Games – Kohistani knew: change comes agonizingly slow in parts of the Muslim world.
That’s it, it’s over, she told herself months ago, when her coach had to fight men outside the stadium in Kabul who told her not to run, that she was a bad Muslim woman. “I decide I am going to go home and I will never come back because the people is not ready to respect me,” she said.
But the moment passed. And Kohistani realized: deep in that slight frame lived not only a sprinter, but also a fighter. “I will continue. Someone should respond this way. And someone should take these problems and I am the one who is ready for the problem.”
So she ran. And ran. Because no one could make her believe churning her legs as fast as she could possibly make them go was against Allah and the Muslim faith, which she remains so devoted to she refused to compete without the hijab, especially during the holy season of Ramadan.
On the day she qualified for the Olympic games, she began to cry underneath her red, black and green scarf, cry for every little girl who was told not to run by her parents in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries. She cried because those girls would never know the joy of moving with the wind in the middle of a dead sprint.

Only one man’s opinion mattered to her, and after early reservations, Kohistani’s father told her simply: “Run. Run for Afghanistan. Run like you’ve never run before.”

Pop!

As the gun went off, she rose quickly from the starter’s blocks. Head down, arms and legs pumping in unison, then slowly rising, building speed. She felt like she was flying Friday morning. She crossed the finish line in 14.42 seconds, a personal best by almost a half-second -- on a track that had no mud, no potholes like back home.
Almost four seconds behind the world record, she did not qualify for the next round and finished 31st out of 32 competitors.
As if that mattered.
“I’m going to say sorry for my family because I was racing for my medal and I cannot achieve any medal for them,” Kohistani said, her eyes welling up.
“You’re crying because you didn’t win?” she was asked.
“No,” she said. “It is the journey. Being here is more important for me than a gold medal.”

The Afghan sprinter now wept openly as she spoke, tears dotting her hijab. “It was one of my dreams to go to the Olympic games. And right now I achieve my dream and my dream come true and I am very happy for that.”
“I’m here to represent a country with lots of problems right now,” she continued. “Right now we are facing the loss of children, the loss of family. There are bombs a lot in my country. The women in my country have lots of problems right now.
Kohistani was letting go of everything, pouring it out. “There are a lot of bad comments about me in my country and there’s lots of people not ready to support me. But I think I will make the nation of Afghanistan proud of me and they are going to never forget me. I just opened a new window, a new door, for the next generation of my country. I can say that they will follow me all the time.
“There are lots of girls in Afghanistan. Because of some social problems, because of family problems, they cannot do sport. But I’m going to say for them: Come and join me, Tahmina, and we can make a very big and strong sport network in our country.”
She was asked if she faced any retribution for competing.
“Right now, when I go back home, there were will be a lot of problems, people who are waiting for me, people who will do things wrong with me.
“Maybe they have their own idea about me,” she said. “I’m not going to say they are wrong. Maybe one day they will realize that I was right. Maybe the next generation of Afghanistan will be proud of me because I opened a new window for them.”
“They are not ready to accept me. They are thinking that I am wrong and I cannot do that because I am a Muslim and I am from Afghanistan and it’s not good for being a female athlete in my country.
“What I face, I face all the challenges, cross all the problems, and right now I am here.”
Here. The Olympics, where the longest journey to the shortest race ended with a 5-foot-3 woman showing more strength than the strongest Bulgarian weightlifter, more stamina than the gold-medal marathoner. Here, where Tahmina Khostani’s tears kept coming, answering the question she pondered on the starting block.
How is this possible?
She just showed us.

Tahmina Kohistani speaks about Olympic dreams

Afghani female sprinter resists country's old ideals, vows to show women new future

LONDON – She could see the men gathering along the track where she trained back home in Kabul, a daunting gauntlet of soccer and volleyball players surrounding the lone woman in the stadium. And Tahmina Kohistani tensed. Something felt wrong. Then they began to shout.
"You can't win a medal from the Olympics, it's not your job!"
"Just be in your house!"
"It's not good for us for an Afghan girl to run!"
"Be behind your man!"
For a moment, tears burned in her eyes. It was not long before she would go to London, to become the only female athlete from a country that does not believe women should play sports. And after 10 minutes of the taunts, she went home that day saying she would not come back. She said she was through. She said she could never face the men again.
 But the next morning she did return, because if she didn't, who would? Who would tell the women in her country that they could run too? Who would push for their freedom?
A few days later the men were back at the stadium again. They gathered along the track as Kohistani ran. She could almost feel the glare of their eyes. She knew they were watching. This time they said nothing.
They would not bother her again.
"I'm going to run for all the women of Afghanistan," Kohistani says.
On Friday night she walked into the Olympic stadium and again tears filled her eyes. Here were all the best athletes in the world, walking together with so much cheering and noise spilling down upon them, and yet she was the only woman from her country. Because of this she wept. She cried for the women who wanted to be athletes, too, but couldn't because their families would not allow it. She cried for the women who ached to be like her. And she cried for the women whose bodies were going to waste because of a culture that still forbids females from exercising.
"In my country the woman has a lot of problems, and every second 10, maybe more than 10 women, are killed in every province of Afghanistan because they have a lot of illness," she says. "I think it's the best way to keep them healthy – by sporting, not medicine. Medicine might make them healthy for a few months, but sports makes them healthy forever."
She sits inside a café in the Athletes Village one day right after the start of the Olympics. Outside, a rain pelts down from a passing summer thunderstorm. She wears a warm-up suit and a head scarf, a small umbrella is by her side. She speaks freely in halting English as if she has been waiting all her life for these Olympics, to say these words. She knows she stands little chance in the 100-meter race she will run Friday against the fastest women in the world. But the result is less important to her, she says. What matters most is the message that will come with the simple act of settling into the starting blocks.
"It's difficult to be a woman in Afghanistan because we have a lot of war and a lot of bad regime," she says. "It's time to change the mind of people about the woman because in the Taliban regime the woman doesn't have equal rights, they have a different idea about the woman. They think you must keep your woman in your house: Don't let them go to school, don't let them go to sporting, don't let them go to anywhere.
In many ways she is the ideal of a new Afghanistan, one molded in the months after the initial U.S. invasion during which years of the Taliban's oppression of women was washed away. As a teenager in school, she started playing basketball, but was always the last player picked, the worst one on the floor. So she looked for a new sport, one that would be more individual, one in which she wouldn't need to rely upon others to be great.
She watched another Afghan woman, Robina Muqimyar, run the 100 meters in Athens back in 2004 and was inspired by what Muqimyar was doing – so defiant and free. She wanted to run too. Soon she, too, had a goal. She was going to be in the Olympics.
Her father Gavid Kohistani, an Afghan politician, wasn't sure he wanted his daughter to run, she says. But then he saw how much she loved it and he told her she must continue, that what she was doing was important enough that that she should not give up a dream.
"She has a very strong determination," says Gavid Kohistani's brother Hasibullah, who spoke for the father who does not speak English. "She's a talented girl. She wants to change society. She would like to be free in Afghanistan and have this be a liberal society."
But Hasibullah Kohistani also concedes: "This is very challenging. It's very difficult for her in Afghanistan. It's not like other countries. In Afghanistan we still have problems, there are people who do not allow the girls to be free. All the time they do not want to see the girls play a sport."
Tahmina's father "is worried about her safety and security," Hasibullah Kohistani says. "He is worried about his daughter and when she goes to exercises all the time. There are people here who do not allow the women to do exercises all the time."
Hasibullah Kohistani says he, too, frets. He is fond of his niece. He loves her stubborn determination and is proud that she is fighting for something big. But he worries about the things that people might say or do. He doesn't want her to be injured. Nor does he want her will to be broken.
After Tahmina Kohistani returned home from the stadium that day the male athletes taunted her, he went to her and said: "Please close your ears. That is your only option."
She said she would do this. And she did. But there are still so many signs of anger, so many people who say that what she is doing is wrong. Like the time she tried to take a taxi and told her driver she was headed to the stadium to train for the Olympics in London. The man stopped the car.
"Get out of my cab!" the driver shouted, throwing her out into the street. "Do not show me your face. I am not going to drive you there."
But when asked about her safety, Tahmina Kohistani shrugs.
"It's very difficult for me," she says. "We need someone to accept this challenge. I'm the person who is going to do this. And I decided I was going to do this for my country and for the people and for the women of Afghanistan.
"I am just going to do this."
She has a dream. She is going to bring women out of the house after this Olympics. She is going to get them running and exercising and living lives they were told they could not have. She is convinced there will be a movement when she returns. She is going to invite all the women to come to the stadium to run with her. She imagines many will come out. And then she believes some of those will even go to the Olympics.
"I know that right now all the women of Afghanistan are proud of me because I'm the only girl who is coming to represent Afghanistan," she says. "It's very difficult, what I am going to do."
Such a crusade never happened after Muqimayr returned after Athens and then later Beijing in 2008. But Tahmina Kohistani shakes her head. No. This time it will be different she says.
"Because the reason is that I have, she doesn't have," Tahmina Kohistani says. "I'm going to do something to change my society but she does not have this idea. She just want to be famous girl. I can say a lot of things about her character, but I know that our feeling is different. My feeling is different because I'm going to do something for my country. I like to change the society, to change the mind of people about [women] and they should accept this. We are not wrong. We are right."
She is going to build a program in her country. She is going to call it Women in Sports in Afghanistan, and it will be dedicated to breaking apart the old way of thinking. She worked on the idea last year when she spent two months studying in the U.S. at Kansas University, and she is sure it is going to work.
"I feel there are a lot of Afghan women who are watching me now and they hope that they should be in place of Tahmina and be representing their country," she says.
And as she sat there in the café at the Olympic village she smiled.
She would love nothing more than if they did.