It sparked the biggest political crisis of the Tokyo Olympics, but Kristina Timanovskaya did not set out to become a symbol of oppression in her home country. Belarus. He just wanted to run.
24-year-old sprinter Timanovskaya, whose specialty is 200 meters, became the center of an international drama after his delegation tried to forcibly send him home from the Games. In an Instagram video, she complained that her trainers had signed her up for an event where she didn’t train for the 4x400m relay because they hadn’t done enough antidoping testing on other athletes.
“I will not say that politics came into my life because there was no politics in general,” he said in a phone call, refusing to give his place for security reasons. He said that he was offered asylum by Poland, who said he could continue his sports career.
“I expressed my dissatisfaction with the coaching team who decided to put me in the relay without telling me, without asking me if I was ready to run,” he said. She was worried that poor performance in an unfamiliar event might cause her injury or trauma.
After the Instagram video, which she later took down, Yuri Moisevich, head coach of the Belarusian national team, and Artur Shumak, deputy director of the Belarusian Republican Athletic Training Center, came to Timanovskaya’s room and persuaded her to break her word. go home. They said the order came from above the pay grades.
“Put your pride aside,” Moisevich can be heard saying. partial registration He quoted the speech and later added: “This is how cases of suicide unfortunately end up.”
Timanovskaya is not a possible dissident. Born in eastern Belarus, she said she was partially deaf as a child and had several surgeries before her hearing improved at age 12.
It was then that he was allowed to start physical education classes. Soon his teachers noticed that he had the ability to run and jump. At the age of 15, relatively late for an elite athlete, he was sent to a special training school for Olympic candidates. At the age of 18 she represented Belarus at competitions in Sweden, Qatar, Poland, England and Italy.
When protests broke out last fall, after long-time Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko won a widely contested election and took office for a sixth five-year term, Timanovskaya did not join the hundreds of thousands of protesters on the streets. She continued her grueling preparations for Tokyo, training with her husband, a former runner, from 9am to 2 or 3pm.
As the government suppressed the protests, nearly 1,000 athletes signed an open letter calling for new elections and an end to the torture and detention of peaceful demonstrators. As a result, 35 athletes and coaches were expelled from the national team.
Timanovskaya was not one of them, as she did not sign the letter.
“I just wanted to prepare for the Olympics,” he said. “I didn’t sign anything so that no one would bother me,” he said.