Iran’s only female Olympic medallist Kimia Alizadeh has announced that she has permanently left her country for Europe.
21-year-old Alizadeh is the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal after claiming taekwondo bronze in the -57kg category during the 2016 Rio Olympics and is very popular in her country.
According to Alizadeh, her decision to leave Iran was a very hard one, but she felt ‘used’ by the Iranian government, who have been playing with her and millions of Iranian women ‘for years.
She said “Let me start with a greeting, a farewell or condolences, I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years. 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. The virtue of a woman is not to stretch her legs! My troubled spirit does not fit with your dirty economic ties and tight political lobbies. I wish for nothing else than for Taekwondo, safety and for a happy and healthy life, she said adding that she was not invited to go to Europe. I remain a daughter of Iran wherever I am.”