While Saudi Women Compete At The Olympics, They’re Banned From Sports At Home – Huffington Post

Today, women living in Saudi Arabia cannot participate in state-organized sports leagues, national tournaments, or even attend their national team’s games as spectators. Of the 150 official sports clubs, none are open to women. While boys’ schools have mandatory gym classes, the majority of girls’ schools do not include a physical education curriculum. Women cannot exercise in fitness studios with men, and female-only facilities are often denied licenses or shut down.

A few underground running clubs have popped up where women run in packs, covered by full hijabs. And some women have tried to operate gyms using health-club licenses, which are used by hotels and nail salons. But they can’t provide the same variety of activities, and their high fees make them inaccessible to many female customers.

As a result, the kingdom is experiencing a vacuum of Olympic-caliber female athletes. So how have four women been able to compete in this year’s Olympics?

In 2012, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) gave Saudi Arabiaan ultimatum: include women in their roster, or be barred from participating. Rather than be disqualified from the entire competition, Saudi officials began sourcing talented women. Countries normally rely on federations to identify Olympic candidates through rigorous competition, but because of a dearth of resources invested in women’s sports in Saudi Arabia, Saudi officials were forced to hand-pick female athletes and enter them on wild-card entries, permitting their participation despite performing under Olympic-qualifying standards.

“In order to meaningfully take part according to the rules of the Olympics, there shouldn’t be one standard for female athletes in Saudi Arabia and one for the rest of the world,” Worden says. “It’s not fair to women to have them competing against Olympians who have trained their whole lives when they haven’t had a comparable amount of support to train.

Without internal infrastructure to promote women in sports, officials were also forced to rely on female athletes who were either foreign or spent significant time training abroad. Attar, for example, grew up in California. Sprinter Cariman Abu Al-Jadail is a student at Boston University, while Judoka Wujud Fahmi trained in the United States and fencer Lubna Al-Omair in Egypt. In other words, all four women representing Saudi Arabia could only amass the skills needed to compete in the Olympics by leaving the country they ostensibly compete for.

Al-Ahmed worries these women placate the international public without being truly representative of most women’s plights in Saudi Arabia. “The girls going to Rio are going to cover up the suffering of 10 million women in Saudi Arabia, and many of them were not even raised there, or grew up in Western regions,” Al-Ahmed says. There are certainly Saudi women who could potentially compete at an Olympic level, but without the resources invested in female athletes of all levels, their talent cannot be developed. “You cannot have elite athletes until you have sports programs set up for girls in state schools,” Worden says. 

This is not to discount the power and talent of the four women who are competing. Female Olympians play a meaningful role as public figures who inspire women to pursue athletic goals. Although Attar and Shaherkani’s participation in the 2012 Olympics was barely covered by Saudi Arabian papers—only one publication made mention of their performance, and was scrutinized for doing so—they remain important models of what could be.

Integrating athletics into the daily lives of Saudi women is not only a matter of nurturing top-notch athletes—it’s also mitigating a serious health crisis for the female public at large. In a report called “Killing Them Softly: How Saudi Ban on Women’s Sports is Harming Their Health,” Al-Ahmed and his colleague Ossob Mohamud found inactivity to be a dire threat to the health of Saudi women.

“Women in Saudi Arabia are being killed softly by their government,” Al-Ahmed and Mohamud write in the report. “Not by public executions or brutal rapes and beatings, but by day-to-day restrictions imposed on them by their government.”