Afghan women lift the veil on their boxing dreams

By Ben Doherty | July 25, 2011 – 12:00AM
[This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/world/afghan-women-lift-the-veil-on-their-boxing-dreams-20110724-1hvi6.html]

THE first two punches are wild: arcing lefts easily parried.

But the third, a straight right, finds its target, and upsets the boxer’s headgear.

The struck fighter adjusts her headscarf.

They box on.

In the bowels of the grandstand of Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, notorious as the venue where the Taliban once held its public executions, a group of young women are the fighting future of Afghanistan.

They show just how far, in some ways, this country has come.

Twice a week they meet for two hours of intense training under the watchful eyes of coaches schooled in the days when Afghanistan’s only friend was the Soviet Union, exporter of unblinking taskmasters and brutal conditioning regimes.

There are no concessions to the boxers’ age or sex: their efforts go beyond tokenism. They are training for the Olympics.

London will have women’s boxing as a medal sport for the first time, and the girls here are determined Afghanistan will have a representative.

In the days of the Taliban, most sports were banned, and for women to even attend as a spectator was unheard of.

For them to consider participating, especially in a sport like boxing, was unthinkable.

But the only women’s boxing gym in all of Afghanistan has built a steady following, from a handful of girls when it began four years ago, to more than 25 now.

It’s been labelled, erroneously, as burqa boxing. The girls — the youngest is 14, the eldest 22 — dress modestly in long sleeves and pants, but none wears a full burqa while training.

Most wear headscarves, but some even eschew that.

Fatima Rezaei, 17, is one of the squad’s most promising talents. She isn’t fazed that attitudes towards women in sport, particularly in the provinces like Maidan Wardak from where she comes, have been slow to change.

“Sports, especially martial arts like boxing . . . are not very acceptable [for women] in our culture, but my parents really let me do this because they knew I was interested in [boxing]. They didn’t care what people think because it’s going to change, it’s not going to stay like it was in the past where people didn’t accept girls to do sports.”

The Olympic dream, she says, is a serious one.

“I always had a dream to do something for my country, to be proud of my country, and also for my people to be proud of me.”

Boxing gyms are famously spartan affairs, Ghazi Stadium’s especially so. Four heavy bags hang around the room, the concrete floor padded with thinning foam mats.

The wall mirrors are cracked, some barely still hanging in the frame.

Above them, hang pictures of various Afghan men’s teams. One boxer, The Age is told, was killed by the Taliban a few months ago, after going to work as a translator for NATO forces.

In one corner, a handful of mismatched dumb-bells and barbells, including some fashioned from car parts, serves as a weights room.

In another, sledgehammers stand by two tractor tyres. It’s a strength-building exercise, we are informed, repeatedly slamming the hammers into the tyres and controlling the rebound builds punching power.

Coach Mohammad Saber Sharifi runs a tight ship. A series of piercing blows on a whistle sees the girls jump from push-ups to sit-ups, to stretches and sprints.

A former world-class pugilist who fought all over the communist world but was never allowed further west than East Berlin, Sharifi, it seems, has picked up some of the familiar locker room banter, which slipped underneath the Iron Curtain.

“What do you think this is, a picnic?” he admonishes the girls who are tardy tying up the “wraps” on their hands.

He is as unconcerned by the less-than-state-of-the-art facilities as he is by any latent antipathy towards women in sport.

“This is Afghanistan, we do our very best with what we have. And if a man doesn’t allow his daughter to go to school, he is not going to allow her to participate in any sports, especially boxing. But these girls come from broad-minded families, and they see the benefit for these girls and for the country.

“We have a lot of resistance to women boxers, but this country is changing, it is becoming more accepting.”

God willing, Sharifi says, London 2012 will see a female boxer with Afghanistan on her back. It’s a far stretch he admits, but everything in this country is.

“We will all work hard, and we will select the best, the strongest and the most talented and we will hope to have one of our girls represent our country at the Olympics.”

Masooma Sepehr, also 17, is Fatima’s sparring partner and another of the squad’s rising talents. In a family of sisters, she chose boxing to be the “big power” for her family a brother would be.

Of those who decry a women’s right to step into the ring, she is dismissive.

“Their minds are closed, they do not understand,” she said. “I love boxing, it’s my favourite sport . . . I’m happy because I’m one proud Afghan women’s boxer.”



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