Paralympics: Zakia Khodadadi, fleeing Taliban, is the first medal of the Refugee Team

Paris, 30 August 2024 – Le Paris Paralympics 2024, already on the second day of finals, marked a historic moment, with the first medal won by the Refugee Team. It happened in women's taekwondo parade (47 kg category), with the bronze won by Zakia Khodadadi, an Afghan girl, born and lived until 2021 in the province of Herat, from where she was evacuated three years ago after the Taliban returned to power.

Twenty-six years old to be completed next September 29th, that of Hodadadi is a name not unknown to those who follow the Paralympics: three years ago, in fact, she had qualified to take part in the Tokyo Games (and with her also the sprinter Hossain Rasouli), but the Taliban's seizure of power, with the consequent closure of the airports, had initially prevented her departure. For a few days, the case of the two Afghan athletes - of whom there was no further news - made an international splash. Still hidden, with great courage, she publicly asked for help with a video appeal and, at that point, an international bridge was activated, in which Spain, France and Australia took part, which allowed her to leave the country and present herself, as Rasouli, at the Japanese Paralympics, where she was also the Afghan flag bearer during the closing ceremony.

Also because of his disability (she was born without her left forearm), and not only for political reasons but also for cultural ones, made of discrimination, already as a young girl Khodadadi – who today lives and trains in Paris – had to live a very difficult daily life in Afghanistan, to the point of even thinking about suicide while still a child. “I fought for years to prove that that was not a limitation,” she said in a recent interview with the official website of the Paralympics, and if she had somehow managed to get out of that situation, she could do nothing against the deprivations imposed by the Taliban regime.

But this, in Paris 2024, allowed her to realize the dream of a paralympic medal, and to do so by entering history by bringing the first laurel to the Refugee Team. Last August 9th, the first medal in the history of the Refugee Team: once again, it was won by a woman, the boxer Cindy Ngamba (bronze in the middleweight division), a Cameroonian who fled her country, where she would have risked arrest because of her homosexuality. Today she lives in England.