Arab Rio 2016 Olympic medallists share recipe for success in Dubai

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  • The star-studded four athletes on stage in Dubai on Sunday.

    On a stage at Godolphin ballroom at Jumeirah Emirates Towers on Sunday, four Arab female athletes gathered to share the story of their journeys to the Olympic podium in Rio de Janeiro last summer.

    Tunisians Ines Boubakri and Marwa Amri, and Egyptians Sara Samir and Hedaya Malak, all claimed bronze medals at the Rio Games, which marked the first time that six Arab women have made the podium at the same Olympics.

    Defying stereotypes and cultural barriers, the quartet showed the Arab region, and the world, that women from the Middle East and North Africa can excel at the highest level in sport.

    Each of the four ladies addressing the Sports Creativity Forum audience in Dubai yesterday had a different background and path to Olympic glory, but they all shared one thing: They managed to thrive in an environment that rarely helped them with the common goal of inspiring young Arab girls to
    follow suit.

    Samir is the youngest of the bunch. At 18, the weightlifter became the first Egyptian woman to step on an Olympic podium when she opened her nation’s account in Rio.

    The diminutive North African melted the hearts of viewers across the region when she applauded herself in disbelief after lifting a personal best total weight of 255kg to seal the bronze medal in Brazil. She couldn’t hold back her tears after that.

    “They were tears of joy but I was also crying because my father was not there with me. He wasn’t able to see me win this medal. He died in June 2015 in an accident. He was always by my side. He had an accident while driving back from my training camp. So when I won the medal, I really wished he was with me to witness it all,” Samir told Sport360.

    The teenager is the first Arab woman to win an Olympic weightlifting medal. She first came across the sport when she joined her family at a national championship in Egypt to watch her brother compete.

    “I saw that there were girls competing as well. So I told my father I wanted to try it out,” she recalls.

    Just five months after she started training, Samir won her first national medal and she’s been on a winning spree ever since. She claimed gold at the Youth Olympics in Nanjing 2014 before her exploits in Rio.

    “I really wanted to win a medal so bad. People were always going on and on about how young I am and that I wasn’t ready, but I proved them wrong,” she says with a smile.

    Samir is used to ignoring all the noise around her and simply goes about her business in a way that best serves her sporting career. She attended military school, where she lived and trained, but when she tried to get her final exams rescheduled because they coincided with the Olympics, no one cooperated. She saw that other athletes had managed to get their tests mailed to the Egyptian embassy of the country where they were competing so she tried to do the same in Brazil, but her school refused.

    “The day I won bronze, I received a letter from school telling me that I failed all my exams even though I didn’t even sit for them,” she said.

    She is now repeating the year she failed.

    Weightlifting is not popular amongst women in the Arab world and Samir is well aware of that. But she believes there are wrong perceptions that taint the image of the sport.

    “People have to stop with the mentality of ‘you’re a girl and you can’t do sport and weightlifting is for men’. None of this is true,” she insists.

    “Weightlifting has nothing to do with you being a man or a woman. They keep saying ‘as a woman your muscles will be way too big’ but that’s not true, we are weightlifters, not bodybuilders, we’re not supposed to have big muscles. It’s a sport like any sport, and it’s good for anyone, both men and women.”

    Fellow Olympic bronze medallist, Marwa Amri hears similar views on her chosen sport – wrestling. Amri came across the sport in 2001 when the Mediterranean Games were staged in Tunisia. The sport intrigued her and she found a training hall close to where she lived.

    “Some people see it as maybe an aggressive sport but I don’t see anything that is too difficult for a woman,” said the 27-year-old. “Being the first Arab and African female to win an Olympic medal in wrestling is a huge feat. We don’t have a big sporting tradition in Tunisia when it comes to wrestling and I was happy to place my country on the map and show that we are capable of achieving great things in this sport.”

    Hedaya Malak’s love affair with taekwondo began when she was just seven, following in the footsteps of her older brother. She watched the Olympics on TV as a youngster and says she wanted to inspire others the same way she felt inspired.

    The 23-year-old Egyptian came ever so close to medalling in London 2012 but lost in the quarter-finals. She says it only fueled her desire even more to go for the podium in Rio. Sat next to her fellow Arab Olympic medallists – who are all being honoured at the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Creative Sports Award ceremony today – Malak believes they could all play a pivotal role in motivating future generations.

    “I feel that we definitely can have a real impact on Arab girls to try and follow suit. Especially in our Arab culture, it’s quite common for people to think that a girl’s only option is to get a degree then get married and stay at home,” said Malak, who is attends the University of Fine Arts in Cairo, where she studies Cinema and Theatre Design.

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    “It’s not a common mentality that a girl can have ambitions, successes, accomplishments. So getting this award for our exploits in Rio is definitely a big thing because it’s showing other girls out there that they can do the same.

    “There should be many more than four of us out there winning Olympic medals. I really hope we can inspire more girls to excel in anything they want to pursue. We should have our own place in society, we have brains and can do whatever we want.”

    Both Samir and Malak wear the hijab and compete in it freely. Malak never saw it as a hindrance to her sporting career and is happy to alter any misconceptions about it.

    “I think the most important thing is that we’re also changing perceptions about hijabis. We can be successful, we can be good at our sport, we can be whatever we want,” she says. “I’m changing the idea that people may have about Muslims, that we are ‘terrorists’ or whatever they are calling us. People asked me questions like ‘do you wear this hijab at home?’ and I explain to them that we have a normal life.”

    For Ines Boubakri, her history-making feats in fencing allowed her to show the world a
    different side of Tunisia.

    She got into the sport courtesy of her mother, Henda Zaouali, who was a fencer herself and competed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

    At 14, Boubakri was already crowned African champion, competing against the grown-ups and beating them.

    After completing her high school diploma in Tunisia, Boubakri moved to Paris in search of better training conditions.

    While she was busy making podiums at world championships, and taking part in three different Olympic Games, Boubakri managed to get a Master’s degree in Mental Preparation in Sport from the Paris Descartes University.

    She has been married for two years and says her message to Arab women is that starting a family does not mean the end of their sporting careers.

    The 28-year-old added: “My family played a huge role. My father was very supportive, he had experience supporting my mother as a champion. She would travel to competitions and he would stay with us at home.

    “I hope more fathers in the Arab world can open their minds and allow their daughters to take up sport.”

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