Who Is Kimia Alizadeh? What To Know About The Female Iranian Athlete Who Defected

Kimia Alizadeh, 21, made history at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro when she became Iran’s only female medalist, taking the bronze price in 57-kg women’s Taekwondo. Now, she is making more history in an entirely different manner: by defecting from her home country.

“Let me start with a greeting, a farewell or condolences,” Alizadeh, sometimes known as “The Tsunami,” said in an Instagram post from Saturday. “I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years. They took me wherever they wanted. I wore whatever they said. Every sentence they ordered me to say, I repeated. Whenever they saw fit, they exploited me.”

While announcing the permanent move from her home country to Europe, Alizadeh offered major critiques of the Iranian government and its treatment of her success. While happy to take credit for her accomplishments, she said that the regime was also critical of her role in sports.

“The virtue of a woman is not to stretch her legs!” they would say, according to Alizadeh.

A day earlier, Seyed Mohammad Pouladgar, head of the country’s Taekwondo Federation, said that Alizadeh had told her coach and father that her trip to Europe was merely a vacation. He dismissed rumors of defection as foreign rumors.

It is unclear which country she has defected to but some believe she has left for the Netherlands.

Alizadeh was born on July 10, 1998, in Karaj, Iran, to an Iranian-Azerbaijani family. In addition to her history-making bronze from 2016, she won the gold in the 63-kg women’s Taekwondo at the 2014 Youth Olympics in Nanjing, beat two-time Olympic gold medalist Jade Jones at the 2015 World Championship for a bronze win, and won silver at the 2017 World Taekwondo Championships.

The BBC listed her among the 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world in 2019.