Masomah Alizada is a part of the IOC’s Olympic Refugee Team in the Tokyo Olympic Games

Afghan cyclist Masomah Ali Zada paves the road for refugees

Masomah Ali Zada: The Female Afghan Cyclist

Afghan cyclist Masomah Ali Zada is hoping to compete in the Tokyo Olympics as part of the Olympic Refugee Team. She left Afghanistan with her family in 2016, because of the social pressures she faced as a woman cyclist and fear of violence from the Taliban. She is now living in France, where her family has been granted asylum.

During Taliban rule in the 1990s, girls were discouraged from going to school, and women were not allowed to work. The Afghan government and its allies have since continued to fight the Taliban. In recent months there has been a rise in targeted attacks on civilians by Taliban fighters, particularly women in the public eye.

Since Alizada started preparing for the games, after she received an IOC Refugee Athlete Scholarship in 2019, she and her coach, Thierry Communal, have become increasingly aware of the symbolic value of her Olympic participation.

“I want to show all the men who thought that cycling isn’t a women’s thing, that I have made it all the way through to the Olympics. And if I can do it, any woman who wants to be involved in cycling can do it, from any country, like Afghanistan. It’s quite simply a passion, it’s our choice to wear any kind of clothing, whatever we feel comfortable in,” she said.

Alizada and her family fled to France from their native Afghanistan after she and her cycling friends were threatened by the Taliban. “It was very difficult to go out cycling in sporting gear,” she recalled. “A lot of people felt it was wrong of us and stopped us to threaten and insult us, and threw stones at us.”

According to Alizada, the violent reaction was most likely due to the fact the most people had never seen a woman on a bicycle before. “They thought it was against our culture, and our religion, but that’s not true. It’s just that it was weird for them to see a woman on a bike for the first time.”

Alizada, who is a practicing Muslim, wears a sports hijab under her helmet when she’s cycling – a small detail of great symbolic meaning. “For me, the sport in itself is not the main thing here. The most important thing is that women from her country and other countries in that region will be able to watch a woman who practices their religion riding a bicycle and that it’s fine to do that,” coach Communal said.

Before arriving in Japan, Ali Zada was given a month of intense training at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle, western Switzerland. Jean-Jacques Henry, her coach at the center, says she is the best female cyclist ever to come out of Afghanistan and is impressed with her rapid progress. In Aigle, coach Henry put her through her paces six days a week.

One 60-kilometer flat training route took her up and down the Rhone river valley, passing castles and waterfalls cascading off the mountains, with Henry alongside her in a car giving instructions. A group of workmen cheered “Go! Go! Go!”. Encouraged, she broke into a smile — a far cry from the roadside interactions in Afghanistan. “I see that I progress every day. If I continue like this, I will be ready for the Olympic Games,” she said.

Henry said despite the brief preparation time, Ali Zada had made huge strides. Her ability to correct mistakes the first time gave her a “considerable advantage”. “She has willpower. She is intelligent. She immediately understands what to do,” he said.

“With the bike, I can go in the mountains, on the plain, discover new places. You see life continues. And I feel alive,” she said.

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