SAINT-DENIS, France — Three years ago, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya’s Olympic Games ended in a dramatic standoff at Tokyo airport when officials from the Belarusian team tried to send her home against her will.
She is back at the Olympic Games in Paris, representing a new country and looking to settle some unfinished business.
“My main goal was to go out there and compete in the very event that I couldn’t run in Tokyo,” Tsimanouskaya told The Associated Press on Thursday after completing her final race of the Paris Olympics, the 4×100-meter relay with the Polish team.
At the Tokyo Olympics, a diplomatic incident occurred when the Belarusian team sent Tsimanouskaya to the airport and she asked the Japanese police for help. She had criticised the Belarusian coaches after they tried to force her to take part in the 4×400 metres relay, in which she had never taken part.
She was banned from taking part in her favourite race, the 200-metre race. She said Belarusian officials tried to get her to board a plane before police at the airport intervened to help her. Tsimanouskaya said at the time she feared reprisals if she returned to Belarus and her grandmother warned her to stay away.
It was a year after President Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus’ longtime authoritarian leader, was re-elected in an election widely viewed by the opposition and Western countries as rigged. Protesters were met with violence by security forces and many opposition members were either detained or fled.
Tsimanouskaya received help moving to Poland, where she quickly settled in. She now competes for Poland, running her preferred 200m and 4×100 relay in Paris.
Tsimanouskaya lost in the new 200m repechage and missed Thursday’s relay final by 0.22 seconds, but says she is not too disappointed.
Two Belarusian coaches have had their Olympic eligibility revoked in connection with the Tokyo incidents and one of them, Yury Moisevich, was banned from athletics for five years in February after a court ruled his actions amounted to abuse of power.
Tsimanouskaya speaks fluent Polish and says she feels accepted in Warsaw. There she works as a personal trainer and influencer and discovered her love of painting. Her past in Belarus still haunts her.
Tsimanouskaya said she had received threats online and believed people had tried to follow her when she left home. She reported this to Polish authorities. In Paris, she said her new team warned her that her safety could be at risk.
The Belarusian Olympic team is not participating in the Paris Olympics because the International Olympic Committee barred the country and its close ally Russia from participating following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops used Belarusian territory to launch their first attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Seventeen Belarusian athletes and 15 Russians are competing at the Olympic Games in Paris as neutral individual athletes. None of them are active in athletics.
The IOC has implemented a strict screening of neutrals to exclude anyone with links to the military or security services, as well as anyone who publicly supports the war. Tsimanouskaya still finds it hard to relax, even at the Olympics.
“Before I came here, representatives of the (Polish) team warned me to be on my guard and not to leave the (Olympic) village alone because they too are afraid that something might happen. And in Tokyo, for example, there were representatives of the KGB (security service) in the Belarusian team,” she said.
“So I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some strange people even among these neutrals. And that’s exactly why I’m still a little worried about myself.”
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AP coverage of the Olympic Games: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
