National Taekwondo Team Holds Open-House Practice with Olympic Bronze Medalist Kimia Alizadeh

Open-house practice of the national taekwondo team in the presence of Paris Games bronze medalist Kimia Alizadeh, Sofia, August 15, 2024 (BTA Photo/Vladimir Shokov)

Sofia,

16.08.2024 10:10

(BTA)

Bulgaria's national taekwondo team held an open-house practice with Olympic bronze medalist from Paris Kimia Alizadeh on Thursday. It took place in the practice hall of the national team in the presence of all team coaches and stars of Bulgarian sport.

Alizadeh was born in Iran. She boasts a long list of athletic accomplishments. She won gold medal at the Youth Olympic Games Nanjing 2014, as well as bronze and silver medals at the World Taekwondo Championships in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Representing Iran, she won a bronze medal at the Olympic Games Rio 2016 in the -57kg category at the age of 18, becoming her country's only female Olympic medalist.

In January 2020, she announced that she had left her country permanently for Europe. Announcing her decision in a Twitter post, she blamed the treatment of female athletes by the authorities for her defection. "They took me wherever they wanted. I wore whatever they said. Every sentence they ordered me to say, I repeated. Whenever they saw fit, they exploited me. [...] I wasn’t important to them. None of us mattered to them, we were tools.” Kimia started training as a refugee athlete with the support of the Refugee Athlete Scholarship and participated in Tokyo 2020 as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team.

In April 2024 she was granted Bulgarian citizenship. Representing Bulgaria at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, she won this country's first medal in this sport (bronze in the women's 57 kg taekwondo).

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