Afghan taekwondo champion Farzad Mansouri, who escaped the Taliban in 2021, has set his sights on gold having been selected for the IOC's Olympic Refugee Team in Paris this summer.
Mansouri, 22, won bronze in the European Olympic qualifiers in Sofia, Bulgaria, in March to seal his place at the 2024 Games.
“I’m really happy and excited that I’m going to the Olympic Games for a second time,” Mansouri told The National.
“I will train harder with good focus and aim to win the Olympic gold medal, Inshallah.”
Mansouri was the flag-bearer for Afghanistan at the 2020 Tokyo Games that took place in 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But just weeks after returning from Japan, he was among the 114,000 who fled Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country following the US withdrawal after 20 years of occupation.
As Mansouri’s father worked for the US-supported administration, he feared the worst, and the family managed to board a flight out of Kabul as the city fell, eventually reaching a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi.
Despite the challenging conditions, Mansouri trained as best he could for eight months while applying for asylum in various countries.
Finally, he was offered an opportunity to train with GB Taekwondo, who supported Farzad to move his life to Manchester to train alongside the very best of the UK’s taekwondo champions.
Since then, Mansouri’s fighting has gone from strength to strength.
He picked up gold medals in the European Club Championships in 2022 and 2023 in the -74kg and -80kg weight categories, and gold in the Serbia Open in 2022 and 2023.
He also claimed silver medals in the 2023 Swedish Open and 2024 Belgian Open.
His progress was enough to seal his selection for Paris where he will be part of the 36-strong Refugee Olympic Team, representing over 100 million displaced people all over the world.
“We are thrilled that Farzad has been selected to the refugee team for the Paris Olympic Games,” Paul Buxton, CEO of GB Taekwondo, told The National.
“When we began supporting Farzad, our mission was to give him a fighting chance of getting to Paris and performing in the Games.
“It is an honour to play a part in Farzad’s journey, and to contribute to the powerful commitment sport has made to helping refugees realise their sporting ambitions and Olympic dreams, despite the unimaginable challenges they face in their lives.”
In the lead up to Paris, Mansouri will head to the European Championships, which take place from May 10-12 in Serbia.
He will then go to the Luxembourg Open before completing his final preparations at the National Taekwondo Centre in Manchester alongside Team GB.
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Children who witnessed blood bath want to help others
Aged just 11, Khulood Al Najjar’s daughter, Nora, bravely attempted to fight off Philip Spence. Her finger was injured when she put her hand in between the claw hammer and her mother’s head.
As a vital witness, she was forced to relive the ordeal by police who needed to identify the attacker and ensure he was found guilty.
Now aged 16, Nora has decided she wants to dedicate her career to helping other victims of crime.
“It was very horrible for her. She saw her mum, dying, just next to her eyes. But now she just wants to go forward,” said Khulood, speaking about how her eldest daughter was dealing with the trauma of the incident five years ago. “She is saying, 'mama, I want to be a lawyer, I want to help people achieve justice'.”
Khulood’s youngest daughter, Fatima, was seven at the time of the attack and attempted to help paramedics responding to the incident.
“Now she wants to be a maxillofacial doctor,” Khulood said. “She said to me ‘it is because a maxillofacial doctor returned your face, mama’. Now she wants to help people see themselves in the mirror again.”
Khulood’s son, Saeed, was nine in 2014 and slept through the attack. While he did not witness the trauma, this made it more difficult for him to understand what had happened. He has ambitions to become an engineer.
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