📷Eight Palestinian athletes will take part in the Olympics. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)
Despite the suffering in Gaza, which has robbed the opportunity to compete from athletes who were killed, injured or directly affected by the war, team Palestine strives to achieve its first Olympic medal.
Amidst calls for the Olympics to ban Israel from competing in the Paris 2024 games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has ignored the calls to have the only nation currently plausibly accused of Genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to be disqualified.
Instead, the IOC decided to go ahead with its ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes from representing their countries, instead forcing them to compete independently and banning them from flying their national flag.
This clear double-standard, which has prompted calls from human rights activists to investigate the racism of the outrageous approach, has led to plans for public demonstrations in France.
While the horrors of the Gaza assault are fresh on the minds of the Palestinian national team, as is a conscious understanding of the discriminatory approach to dealing with Israel’s war crimes, the athletes hope to make their people proud and bring home Palestine’s first ever Olympic medal.
“Making history; the first Palestinian taekwondo player to ever qualify for the Olympic Games. I’m very proud and happy to say to have made it this far,” 18-year-old Omar Yaser Ismail, from Jenin, said after becoming the first Olympian to represent Palestine that has entered the games under the game’s official criteria.
All other athletes have had to go through a wild card play off process in order to make it. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment since I was a little boy. I was very happy to imagine myself in Paris with the best athletes in the world. Very happy to show my flag on the podium,” stated the young Olympian who will go on to compete in the under 58kg Taekwondo weight class, following victories over fellow athletes from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan at the Asian qualifying tournament in Tai’an, China.
The Palestinian athletes will compete in boxing, judo, swimming, shooting, track and field and taekwondo. 20-year-old Waseem Abu Sal, from Ramallah, will compete in lightweight boxing division (under 63kgs), with his first bout occurring on July 28, and told AFP that it has been his dream to win an Olympic medal home since age 10 and that “every day, I woke up wondering how to get to the Olympics.”
In track and field, Mohammed Dwedar will represent Palestine in the Men’s 800m sprint, while Layla Al-Masri will compete in the Women’s 800m sprint.
Two Palestinian swimmers will also be competing in Paris. They are Valerie Tarazi, who will compete in the Women’s 200-meter medley, and Yazan al-Bawwab, who will compete in the Men’s 100-meter backstroke. Tarazi, who is a Palestinian-American that has relatives in the Gaza Strip says that “we’re not here to compete just for ourselves or to represent ourselves personally”.
On the war, she stressed that she is one of the luckiest Palestinians alive, but also feels a longing to be in Gaza with the people, stating of the situation that “it weighs on us every day.”
In skeet shooting, 49-year-old Jorge Antonio Salhe will also represent Palestine, while 27-year old Fares Badawi, from the occupied West Bank, will represent Palestine in Paris, competing in the Judo under-81 kg weight class.
Unfortunately, Palestinian athletes have also been robbed of the ability to compete in their sports this time around too.
For example, a weightlifter from the Gaza Strip, named Mohammed Hamada, had competed in the 2020 Olympic Games in the 102 kilograms (225 pounds) weight class, but was forced to forego competing in his sport this time around. Although he managed to escape Gaza, to Egypt, after being forced from his home and stuck in the territory’s southernmost city of Rafah, lack of access to food, combined with the other horrors of the war, led to him losing around 20kgs, or 40 pounds, of body-mass.
Also, Palestine’s most famous Olympian, long-distance runner Majed Abu Maraheel, who in 1996 in Atlanta became the first Palestinian to compete in the Olympics, was killed during the war on Gaza due to Israel’s refusal to allow him to receive desperately needed medical treatment.| via The Palestine Chronicle
This article, ‘Making History’ – Meet The Palestinian Olympic Team, was originally published in The Palestine Chronicle.
