From our Olympics correspondent in Paris – Fariba and Yulduz Hashimi fled Kabul after the city once again fell to the Taliban in 2021. Three years later, the sister cyclists are riding alongside one another in the 2024 Paris Olympics women’s road race on Sunday, proudly bearing the black, red and green Afghan tricolour torn down by the country’s new masters when they seized the capital.
It’s been a long road to Paris for the Hashimi sisters. Fariba and her sister Yulduz came to France as part of a team of six athletes who will be competing for Afghanistan in the 2024 Paris Olympics. The team is made up of three men and three women – a deliberate show of equality in the face of the Taliban’s fierce opposition to women’s involvement in professional sports. Since retaking power in 2021, Kabul’s new masters have sought to excise women from public life, restricting their access to school and higher education as well as the workplace.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the Taliban refuses to recognise the women athletes on the team, which was assembled following talks between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Afghanistan’s own National Olympic Committee-in-exile. Taliban officials have been banned by the IOC from attending the Games, and no country has recognised them as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.
Yulduz and Fariba were in Kabul when the capital fell, narrowly escaping the besieged city with the help of Italian world champion cyclist Alessandra Cappellotto, who helped them and a handful of other cyclists board a plane to northern Italy. Speaking outside the Olympic Village in the suburb of Saint-Denis northeast of Paris, Fariba said that seeing the Taliban return to power had been a staggering moment.
“When the Taliban [retook power] in my country I was in Afghanistan – after three or four days they had taken control all over Afghanistan,” she said. “I wasn’t just worried for myself, I was worried about my people, I was worried about everything. Because the first time they moved into my country [in 1996] they stopped everything for women, everything – school, sport. What is left for women? They closed everything.”
Even before the Taliban marched once again into Kabul following the withdrawal of NATO and US forces after two decades of military occupation, the Hashimi sisters faced an uphill struggle to be accepted as professional cyclists. Growing up in the conservative Faryab province on the border of Turkmenistan, the two women had had to keep their passion a secret even from their own families.
“I never thought that I would become a professional cyclist,” Fariba said. “When I went to race for the first time, my family never saw that I was in the race because I wore a hijab, I put on sunglasses – nobody saw that it was Fariba and Yulduz. I raced three times in my city, and each time my sister and I won. Then after my second race, some journalists took my photo – and my family saw my face.”
Although their family has since become a source of support for the two sisters, Fariba said that the sight of two young women practising in the streets of their hometown had been met with outrage in the community.
“Not just now, even before, the mentality was super bad,” she said. “People never supported women cyclists. When I tried training outside my house, they were throwing rocks and saying that women were only for staying inside the house, that it wasn’t the correct thing to do.”
Fariba said she hoped that her performance in the Paris Olympics – or even just her presence – would help push back against the idea that women and girls had no place in the world of professional sports.
“You can change a lot of that mentality together,” she said. “I will try to do it for my people, to show that cycling is something nice that everyone can do, not just the men but women as well.”
Fariba will be riding in the women’s road race this Sunday alongside her sister, who finished 26th in the rain-soaked time trial last Saturday. There is, she knows, a lot riding on her performance.
“It’s going to be hard,” she said. “I’ll try my best – everyone comes for a good result. I hope I can bring one of the three medals, and I can represent my country and the 20 million women in Afghanistan – that’s my dream.”
As part of that representation, Fariba and the rest of the Afghan team are competing not under the white flag of the Taliban’s self-proclaimed Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but the black, red and green tricolour that flew over Kabul before the city fell to Taliban forces.
“This is my flag, and I’m fighting with this flag,” Fariba said. “It’s our flag, it has a long history for us. It’s life for us.”
The two sisters are now living in Italy, having never imagined they would find themselves exiled from their homeland. Despite the elation of competing in the Olympics, Fariba said, it was hard not to miss the place where she and her sister had grown up.
“I think about [Afghanistan] a lot,” she said. “I hope that one day I can go back to my country and be back with my family. I really miss my country. I really, really, really, miss it. And I want to come back one day. I hope that the situation changes, and that I can do my sport in my country.”
