I asked an Afghan female cyclist what she wanted people to hear as they looked on at the chaos in her country. She said, “Please, please don't stay silent,' James Stout writes for NBCNewsTHINK.
in the Tokyo Olympic Games as a feel-good feature. We regularly shared these atypical stories while totally failing to reflect on the ongoing challenges of everyday life for many Afghan women.
I asked an Afghan female cyclist what she wanted people to hear as they looked on at the chaos in her country. She said, “Please, please don't stay silent." These stories were unquestionably inspiring. In the case of bike racing, the sport I know best, a women’s cycling team sprang up in the early 2010s after the daughter of the coach of theasked him if she could try it out. Shannon Galpin, a women’s rights activist and National Geographic Adventurer of the Year award winner, helped him coach the emerging team starting in 2012 and bringing a cargo of cycling gear to help more girls ride, both for competition and for fun.
A generation of girls grew up admiring those first brave Afghan women who rode, and they began to do the same themselves. In 2016, the Afghan women’s national cycling team was evenby a group of Italian politicians. They had begun to compete abroad and had hopes of traveling to the Olympics to represent their country in Tokyo before the devolving security situation disrupted their participation.
A few weeks later, the Olympic stories about the female refugees who did compete unwittingly put their families back home in Afghanistan in mortal danger from the Taliban, who see women’s sports as sacrilege and the families of these women as traitors. And our work in highlighting those incredible women still in the country, who broke countless barriers to do what most of us take for granted, has placed a target on their backs as well.
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