By Richa Naidu
LONDON, May 23 (Reuters) – On a rainy November morning in 2018, 15-year-old Dorsa Yavarivafa and her mother left Tehran for Turkey with fake German passports – the first thing she grabbed when told they were leaving at 4 in the morning was her badminton bag.
A month later they flew to Germany, then Belgium and finally France. Yavarivafa would be imprisoned three times – once completely alone for a day, crying and away from her mother – before arriving in Birmingham, England, in late 2019 and finally finding a home.
She said she fled her country for two reasons: her mother wanted to change her religion and Yavarivafa had been repeatedly rejected by the national badminton team without being told why.
“I was very scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” said Yavarivafa, who will turn 21 in July while competing in the 2024 Paris Games as part of the largest refugee Olympic team to date, with 36 athletes from 11 countries. .
“I didn’t know where I was going. My mother only told me that we were going to another country, but she never told me how or where,” Yavarivafa added.
“It was all worth it. Now that I think about it, all that suffering is over, so now I’m very happy.”
Yavarivafa has been playing badminton for a decade, but began training seriously when he was 11 years old.
“I started winning a lot of tournaments in Iran,” says Yavarivafa. “That’s where I took it seriously and watched a lot of badminton. I was inspired by a lot of people; one of them is (Spanish) Carolina Marín.”
The 20-year-old now studies Sports and Exercise Sciences at Middlesex University in London and trains three times a week at the Sankey Academy, an independent badminton club in Milton Keynes.
When asked what it meant to be part of the refugee team, Yavarivafa said he had a message for the world’s 100 million refugees: “You are not alone… It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter where you live now, the dreams comes true”. (Reporting by Richa Naidu; Edited in Spanish by Héctor Espinoza)
ReutersConocé The Trust Project
2024-05-23 16:15:12
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