Refugee athlete's dream of a taekwondo medal is cut short at Paris Olympics

PARIS (AP) — Having overcome so many hurdles, the disappointment was immense for refugee athlete Hadi Tiranvalipour as his dream of winning an Olympic medal was cut short when he lost in a taekwondo qualification bout on Wednesday at the Paris Games.

Tiranvalipour was up against Omar Ismail of Palestine in the men’s under 58 kilograms competition and was handed a 2-0 loss in a lopsided match at the lavish Grand Palais venue on the first day of taekwondo events.

“I’m not satisfied with my performance, I don’t have an answer for this. I wanted a good result, it’s not happening,” he said.

Before making the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, Tiranvalipour fought for eight years as a member of the Iranian national team, winning the gold medal at the 2015 Asian Junior championship back in 2015.

But Tiranvalipour, who also worked as a TV presenter and studied sports science, was forced to leave his country after speaking out in favor of women’s rights, losing his job. In October 2022, he traveled to Turkey, then to Italy where he lived in a forest for 10 days and then slept three months on a sofa in a shared accommodation that Iranian students had helped him find.

“Our journey is too difficult,” he said after his loss to Ismail. “Not for me, for all the refugee athletes. It’s too difficult for each of us to be here.”

Athletes from the refugee team compete under the same flag and come from different parts of the world. The team was created for the Rio Olympics in 2016 as a symbol of hope and to call attention to the plight of refugees worldwide.

After training alone in a park, Tiranvalipour finally approached the Italian federation, which helped him apply for asylum and settle for good in the country.

In the buildup to the Games, he trained at Olympic Sports Center in Roma with the likes of Vito Dell’aquila, the defending Olympic champion.

After missing out on Olympic qualification during European qualifiers in March, he was selected by the refugee Olympic team and had big expectations in Paris.

“I’m not satisfied because I had too much sacrifices about my losing weight process, my training. I’m really sad,” he said. “We passed so many difficult journeys. If you have a target, you have to keep going. Life is like this. I have to accept (my loss) and I have to think about the future.”

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