Amani Al-Awami

Al-Jazirah newspaper

LIKE many women from the Kingdom, they traveled abroad to prove themselves, rid the chains of local contradictions and create history. While many succeed in this endeavor, Sarah Attar and Wojdan Shahrkhani haven’t.



Sarah and Wojdan never thought for a moment that their participation in 2012 London Olympics would create new complications and spark racist attacks from Saudis. They faced many challenges, including breaking the ban on women’s participation in international sports in a country where schoolgirls and even female college students taking part in sporting activities is a taboo. Their ambition and the International Olympic Committee’s threat to expel Saudi Arabia from the event if women were not included in the Saudi delegation were the main factors that opened the way for Sarah and Wojdan.



What is actually shameful is not the participation itself, but participation without training. It was a bad decision on the part of the Kingdom to announce women’s participation just two weeks before the start of the Olympics.



Sarah and Wojdan didn’t have time to prepare for the Games and they didn’t receive the proper training. The only thing they received was their uniforms emblazoned with the Saudi logo.



Some people think that women’s sport is corrupt and leads to gender mixing. This is not true. What if special, women-only sports clubs are established and managed in accordance with our social values? Saudi women are deprived of this simple right, a right that gives women a chance to stay healthy at a time when women suffer from many illnesses due to sedentary lifestyles.

Since the end of 2004 Olympics, we were aware of the Olympic Committee’s decision over women’s participation in 2012. Sports authorities in the Kingdom ignored and forgot about this decision. They did not work to create the foundations for Saudi women’s participation in this historic occasion.

 

A Shoura Council member, in an interview with a local newspaper in 2006, said the council did not have any problem approving the establishment of women-only sports clubs in five regions of the Kingdom. At the same time, he said Saudi Arabia would not lose anything if the Olympics Committee forced it out of the Games because they cannot impose social values in international competitions. Sadly, the opposite happened. The promised five women’s clubs were not established, Saudi women participated in the Olympics and Saudi membership was not frozen.



In London, 5,000 kilometers away from their home country, crowds of foreign men and women cheered Sarah and Wojdan while people in Saudi Arabia were busy tarnishing their reputation. I thought a war was going on. The attackers never took into consideration that it is the holy month of Ramadan and they should refrain from badmouthing people.



When the Olympic Games are over, we are left with only two choices: Either we start laying the foundations to support more Sarah’s and Wojdan’s, prepare and train them to take part in future competitions, or we get ready for more like Jasmine Al-Khaldi, a Filipino-Saudi swimmer who participated in the Olympics under the Philippine flag.