Afghan female swimmer aiming high

Helena Saboori (Photo from Sayed Ihsan Taheri)

TMP – 19/04/2017

A young Afghan woman is dreaming of becoming the country’s first ever female Olympic swimmer and has set her sights on competing in 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Elena Saboori, 25 , is a swimming coach and also  the head of the recently created Women’s Swimming Committee.

“At first I was really afraid of drowning, but that’s when I thought I’d become a coach, because girls do not know how to swim here,” Elena explains.

She taught herself to swim by downloading instruction videos from the Internet and practicing in the pool in Kabul.

Drowning isn’t the only challenge Elena faces in pursuit of her dream. She has received violent threats and has been advised by opposers to stay away from the pool where she currently trains.

“We have several types of threats, but I feel that it [the security situation] is a bit better and I’m not as afraid as before. But I know that I have broken a taboo. I took a big risk by launching this team,” she explains in an interview.

The president of the Afghan Federation of Swimming, Sayed Ihsan Taheri, says that women’s sports are misunderstood in Afghanistan, with even conservative countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia having female swimming teams. “All Muslim countries except Afghanistan have a women’s team, even the strictest. They have training sites for girls, but here, there is some misunderstanding about women’s sport, that it is banned by Islam,” Taheri said.

Around 30 swimming pools operate across Kabul, but only one of them welcomes women. The lack of training pools is a major challenge for Elena and her team, as training gets underway so that she can try to represent Afghanistan in the Central Asian Championships in Turkmenistan at the end of April.

Elena says at least a dozen other women have expressed a desire to join her swimming team. “They contact me and of course I accept: I can’t let them down,” she says.