The water did not attract his attention. Although her mother loved swimming, Sabine Hazboun I wanted to be a gymnast. Even as a child she did the handstand and she applied herself to her parents as the next Palestinian gymnast who would compete in some Olympic Games. But, as we know, children change professions a lot and, after trying fencing and basketball, she jumped into the pool at the age of six and never came out.
In Bethlehem, in the middle of the war, there was no Olympic swimming pool and I had to train in the one at the nearest hotel. It soon became a way of life, but the obstacles and adversities of a Palestine The war left him without a pool to train in at the age of 13. She, however, did not want to give up and reinvented herself to maintain her form: she made throws from her house to the separation wall. A distance of two kilometers that she covered without stopping every day at 5 in the morning until the CAR de Sant Cugat he ran into her.
“I grew up in a family that told me: ‘if you want, you can,'” Hazboun claims in the face of prejudice. She lived as a child with a lack of rights as a person, beyond that as a woman, and she focuses on the lack of facilities, rights and opportunities that she had to fight against to be able to access her dreams: competing in some Olympic Games.
Double the effort
She knew where she wanted to go, but the world around her was increasingly eroding that optimism. “My dreams are not going to be real. Now I know that I had depression. I saw through Facebook how other rivals trained in the US, Spain… I thought: ‘I wish I had that’. Later, in my life, those moments helped me , since, when I couldn’t take it anymore physically, I remembered when I couldn’t even train to keep going. To achieve something small I had to make twice as much effort as others, than the boys and the Europeans,” he recalls.
Those barriers were no match for his stubbornness and tenacity and he kept his goal until his opportunity came. “I will always remember it, as if it were yesterday. It was February 2011 and the CAR of Sant Cugat was visiting the city on a project to improve sports in the area. They went to the club where my father worked, which turns out to be the rival of which I was part of it. They called me to go and I met with them. I didn’t know what it was and they told me: ‘Would you like to go train with Mireia Belmonte?'”, he explains with a smile on his face. He immediately accepted, she and her father, that he trusted from the beginning that her daughter could fulfill all of her dreams.
Life change
He left the “bubble” and moved to Barcelona, where he began to train progressively to get back into the rhythm. And there was no one to stop her. Despite not speaking “a word” of Catalan and Spanish, she felt great in her new house. She could train in facilities that she herself had never dreamed of. and he reminded himself every day of his plan to get to the Games.
Where she first competed was at the 2008 World Swimming Championships in Manchester, but her childhood dream came true in 2012, at the London Games, where she became an Olympic swimmer.
The experience was exceptional as well as devastating. “She felt like she had the pressure to represent all women, not just in Palestine but around the world. I suffered a lot of stress and fell into depression after the games, something that happens a lot and that is not talked about,” she confesses. From then on she ignored the pool, she repudiated it. She studied translation and interpretation and wanted to reorient her life, even though there was something that kept her linked to sports. A few years later she found out why.
In 2015 she realized that she was denying a part of herself, staying away from the sport and, through a scholarship, entered the COI. After seven years, she is now the program manager for the Olympic Refugee Foundation. “I was missing the human part and I found it in the Foundation. Here I feel that all my parts fit together”, he confesses. He leads a project with many aspects, which seeks to provide shelter to all athletes who have been affected by displacement. “There are eight active programs in eight countries. For me it is never enough, I always want more.”
2023-12-04 06:30:47
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