How the IOC ignored Afghan women’s woes: The Manizha Talash saga at Paris 2024
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games marked an historic moment in sporting history – for the first time ever, there were an equal number of both male and female athletes at the Games across all sports.
Coming down to number-crunching, one can clearly observe that there were 5,250 places allocated to both men and women in the City of Light this summer at the greatest spectacle of sport.
When spectators sit back and reminisce, they will probably think about remarkable female athletes like Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles from the United States.
Simone Biles with her medals at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (Image source: Getty Images)
But, even after the milestone achievements for gender equality that have been accomplished at Paris 2024, there is still something wanting when it comes to truly bringing equality and liberating women by giving them agency through sport.
What is this something? Can one point something out in specific or not? To learn more in this regard, let us dissect and look through the example of Afghan breakdancer Manizha Talash at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Manizha Talash: In search of long-lost liberation for Afghan women
The end of last month brought with it the third anniversary of Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in the wake of the departure of troops from the United States.
Throngs of athletes and sportspersons fled the country as the Western-backed republic fell to its knees in front of the newly-formed Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan, which believes in formulating laws in accordance with the Islamic Sharia.
The Taliban celebrating three years since its return to power with a military parade (Image source: Getty Images)
The new laws essentially suffocate the lives of Afghan women – denying them basic rights for education, work, health, and even sport – who are now forced to remain inside homes and only venture out in the company of a male family member.
Manizha Talash, a breakdancer who took part in the first-ever breaking competition at Paris 2024, also fled from Kabul, eventually ending up in Spain to pursue her passion for breakdancing.
Manizha Talash pictured in June 2021 in Afghanistan (Image source: Getty Images)
She became a part of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Refugee Olympic Team at Paris 2024, but was disqualified straight after her pre-qualifier battle against the Netherlands’ India Sardjoe.
The reason: she displayed political messaging right after her face-off against Sardjoe – an Afghan burqa with the words ‘Free Afghan Women’ written with white paint across it.
This act of ‘political messaging’ cost Talash her place at Paris 2024’s breaking competition, because as per rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.
As for the 21-year-old trailblazing breakdancer, she assured everyone that the Paris 2024 act was not a one-off. She said, “I wouldn’t do the same thing but I don’t just want to talk, I want to act, and if I can do something else, I will.”
Even in her Instagram post following her disqualification, she bravely expressed solidarity with Afghan women, claiming that breaking is a form of expression, and she felt she had to do it even if it meant being eliminated from the highest level of competition in the sport of breakdancing.
Manizha Talash displays the ‘Free Afghan Women’ sign at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games (Image source: Getty Images)
“I know the rules at the Olympics say no politics in sports. But my message is not a political slogan. It is a statement about basic human rights. The girls in my country can’t do anything.
“These are my friends, classmates, and neighbours – they have essentially no rights. They cannot study, work, and can barely leave the house. But they deserve to be free.
“With the fabric of this burqa that represents so much, I want to show the girls back home that even in the most difficult circumstances, they have the strength to transform things. From a burqa they can make wings. If they are in a cocoon, one day soon they can fly.”
Manizha Talash’s protest political or humanitarian?
The fundamental question to ask here is: was she interfering in a sporting mega-event by bringing politics into it, or was she simply asking for basic human rights for her fellow Afghan women who have been suppressed by the Taliban for more than three years now?
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Just a few days ago, women were forbidden from looking at men they don’t know and from talking loudly inside homes. Men, too, aren’t exempt from rules and laws: they can’t shave their beards off, and are bound by law to never miss prayers or skip religious fasts.
Mind you, here we are talking about one of the harshest regimes in the present-day world; a country where women are denied basic educational, vocational, and healthcare rights.
Case in point: Just last month, nineteen female medical students from Afghanistan arrived in Scotland to complete their medical studies, as they had been banned from attending university in their native country.
Afghan women in Scotland to complete their medical degrees (Image source: Getty Images)
One of the women highlighted the struggle she and her fellow students had gone through to merely get the chance of studying medicine in Scotland.
“We endured one thousand days of suffering to reach this point. One thousand days of being confined to our homes, of having our voices silenced with nothing but tears and sorrow, our lives wasting away.”
Therefore, in a country where every female voice of dissent is brutally and systematically silenced by a patriarchal regime, the symbolic acts of female athletes like Talash can give renewed hope to the oppressed women of Afghanistan that the world is taking cognisance of what is unfolding daily on ground zero under the Taliban’s rule.
Thus, the fairly predictable move from the IOC to disqualify Talash from the breaking competition feels like the sporting officials working under Thomas Bach did not read between the lines before ousting the Afghan-born breakdancer.
Had they done so, they would have surely realised that what Talash did was not an act of political dissent, but of advocating for human rights for roughly half the population of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
