Muhammad Ali went to prison. James McClean received death threats. Colin Kaepernick lost his job and Elnaz Rekabi vanished.
With sport comes diverse and far-reaching platforms. People have long used leverage to establish who they are and what they represent to promote causes. Sometimes the fact they are competing is the cause.
Rekabi returned to Iran this week and from the off it unspooled like the soundtrack of a young woman approaching a chilling point of reckoning.
Rekabi dared to climb a wall in South Korea during competition without wearing a hijab. Kaepernick took a knee. Ali refused the draft to go to Vietnam. Kathy Switzer ran as a woman in the 1967 Boston Marathon. McClean didn’t wear a poppy. The protest list is long.
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Wall climbing is not mainstream, but it is now an Olympic sport and debuted at the Tokyo Olympic Games last summer. By being Iranian and competing without a head covering Rekabi stepped into a new and less certain zero-sum world.
The Iranian morality police were responsible for the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained over clothing. Amini’s mysterious death plunged Iran into a string of civil protests where more than 200 have now been killed.
For Rekabi’s shameful climbing of the wall, for her embarrassing exhibitionism, for flicking a black ponytail off her face to find a foothold, she understood there would be consequences.
Arriving home, jubilant crowds waited at the airport to greet her, state television cameras filmed her, all of it sinisterly choreographed. Her subdued demeanour, her protestations that she had merely forgotten to slip into the head covering before leaving the changing room, her unexplained early arrival back to Iran and the BBC’s Persian service quoting an unnamed “informed source” who said Iranian officials seized both Rekabi’s mobile phone and passport.
“I came back to Iran with peace of mind, although I had a lot of tension and stress. But so far, thank God, nothing has happened,” she said. So far, thank God nothing has happened.
Outside the airport she entered a van and was driven through the crowd, who cheered. It is unclear where she was taken. Doubtlessly, another case for the morality police to bring to firm conclusion.
Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai disappeared from public view in November 2021 after a rare allegation of sexual assault against a retired top official in China’s Communist Party.
The international tennis community, including the sport’s best-known stars and governing bodies, questioned Chinese authorities on her whereabouts and the allegations. Last December, the Women’s Tennis Association said it was halting all of its tournaments in China because it wasn’t satisfied that Peng was safe.
More than two weeks later, Peng spoke publicly. Like Rekabi she said she too was mistaken, denied she had accused anyone of sexual assault.
More recently, McClean played for Wigan against his old club Sunderland, then posted a lengthy Instagram message highlighting the hypocrisy around anti-discrimination campaigns, his old club Sunderland’s lack of action when he was a player and the sectarian abuse he’s received over the years.
“Considering every single year, we have an FA representative come into each club to discuss the same old crap they spew to us about discrimination, every single year I challenge them on the abuse, every single year they do nothing,” he said.
“This clip is one of yesterday, which can be heard clearly of one particular chant, as well as other chants of ‘f**k the pope and IRA, being sung ... as well as numerous individual chants of ‘Fenian b*****d, Fenian c**t, you dirty Irish c**t’ (while displaying a tribute before the game honouring Niall Quinn who is the same nationality as myself).”
There is a less than cheery history of sports protests, where defiant acts have seemed less impactful than the self-harming effect they have on the athlete involved.
In that light, Iranian Olympic Committee member Khosravi Vafa on Thursday described Rekabi as being “a guest at Iran’s Olympic Committee hotel for one day, along with her family”.
That’s right, nothing to see. Just like Stuart Lockwood, the five-year-old British hostage, whose hair uncle Saddam playfully tussled in the run up to the first Gulf War, the Rekabi family should not feel terrified.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Kaepernick taking the knee in the NFL cost him a career. The Trump years couldn’t take what he was selling. Iran is now struggling with such brazen chutzpah and subversion, now fearfully chilled, from a 33-year-old female climber.
But it is all part of a celebrated continuum, a constant pushing of buttons, asking of questions, calling out of hatreds, whether it’s McClean’s insufferable abuse or Iranian misogyny.
In 1946, Brooklyn Dodgers manager Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to a minor league baseball contract. Robinson became the first African-American to play professionally in nearly 50 years. His signing broke baseball’s bigot barrier.
Robinson carried the torch for Ali, who passed it on to Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who inspired Billy Jean King, who gave voice to Naomi Osaka.
Sport has unlikely heroes. Rekabi is keeping it lit. Whether many listen is a moot point.
