Olympics: Refugee team: After escaping Iran: Yekta Jamali’s Olympic dream comes true

For Yekta Jamali, a dream that she had as a child in her home country of Iran has come true these days in Germany. “I was incredibly happy when the IOC announced that I could take part in the Olympics in Paris,” says the 19-year-old with a beaming smile. The weightlifter will compete at the Summer Games for the International Refugee Team of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which includes a total of 36 athletes. Many special stories have led these refugees to the Olympics, Yekta Jamali’s is one about the longing for freedom.

With great courage, the Iranian woman dared to escape in 2022 as a 17-year-old, all alone and still a minor, in order to start a new life away from the repressive mullahs’ regime. When the young woman turned her back on her homeland, she was at the Junior World Championships in Athens. Shortly after Jamali won silver there, she escaped from her Iranian guards and quickly boarded a plane to Germany. “I had a visa for the entire EU,” she reports: “And I knew that I could continue my sport in Germany and that everything would be better there.”

Jamali doesn’t want to say too much about her life in Iran before she fled so as not to endanger her relatives and friends who still live there. Just this much: »There are many problems in my country. It is especially harder for women than for men. You always have to do what they say and you can’t say no.” By “them” we mean the mullahs’ watchdogs, who particularly control the top sports scene. Iran’s notorious morality police, who, for example, repeatedly try to enforce the obligation to wear a headscarf by force, have long been a household name around the world. In sports, some of the dress codes are also inconvenient for Jamali and her colleagues. At the same time, the regime wants to present the athletes as “model women” and pays particular attention to conformity.

Jamali has a different idea about life and her sporting career. For example, she presents them to her approximately 36,000 followers on Instagram – also in her native language, Persian. In addition to posts from competitions and training, she also repeatedly shows herself as a modern, attractive woman without a headscarf.

The difficult contact with her parents after her escape, who initially tried to persuade her tearfully to return to Iran, is now working steadily again. Whenever daughter Yekta is tired or sad in Germany, she thinks about what her parents have always asked of her: “They always told me that women have to be strong.” In this sense, she is completely alone in her new life Integrated home and found friends. However, her new life mainly consists of training and school. She is in the eleventh grade of a high school, now speaks German very well and would like to become a physiotherapist or nurse after graduating from high school.

However, twelve weeks before the start of the Summer Games in Paris, the focus is currently on training in Mutterstadt and at the Heidelberg Olympic base. The strong athlete wants to improve her best performances of 101 and 126 kilograms in the snatch and clean and jerk at the Olympics. Both values ​​significantly exceed your own body weight.

If she manages to do that, the Iranian will probably be the only one in Paris who can still prove the effectiveness of the German weightlifting system. Local dumbbell athletes have not qualified and can only hope for wildcards. That could change at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. “Maybe by then I’ll have a German passport and can start for Germany,” says Yekta Jamali. However, her heart will always beat for her homeland – as a “strong role model” for the oppressed women in Iran.