Sun, Oct 01, 2023 page7

• Yemenis united at the Asian Games

  • AFP, HANGZHOU, China
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  One delivered gas cylinders in government-run Aden for a living and the other cooked meals in rebel-held Sana’a. Now the two athletes from war-torn Yemen find themselves on the same team at the Asian Games.

  Yemen has been in the grip of a war since 2014, pitting forces loyal to the internationally recognized government against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The conflict has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

  The Yemeni team at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, is the only sign of the country’s unity, delegation chief Abdel Sattar al-Hamadani said.

  

  Yemen’s athletes and team officials enter the Hangzhou Olympic Center Stadium during the opening ceremony of the Asian Games on Saturday last week.

  Photo: AP

  “We marched behind a single banner at the opening of the Games,” al-Hamadani told reporters.

  “Sport has paid a heavy price for the war,” said al-Hamadani, who heads the Yemeni Basketball Association, pointing out the absence of any material support, apart from that provided by the International Olympic Committee and Asian bodies.

  Said al-Khodr, a judoka from Aden, worked in the morning and trained in the afternoon to make the Games team.

  

  Yemen’s Ali Omar Ahmed returns against Sanyog Kapali of Nepal during their men’s preliminary-round table tennis match at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday.

  Photo: AFP

  “The love of sport runs through my veins and I toil from dawn until 3pm carrying gas cylinders on my back to deliver across the city,” he said.

  “Then I take a shower and go to my judo training session nine or 10 kilometers from home,” the 19-year-old father of one said.

  The athlete said he often hitchhikes to training because the transport allowance from his judo club “isn’t enough to cover my costs.”

  

  Yemen’s Gubran Ebrahim Abdulhakim Mohamm return to Bahrain’s Rashed Khaled Rashed during their men’s preliminary-round table tennis match at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, on Wednesday.

  Photo: AFP

  The Yemeni economy was already in crisis before the Houthis seized Sana’a in September 2014, prompting a Saudi Arabian-led military alliance to intervene the following March.

  Al-Khodr said that at one stage, he quit the sport given the difficulties, including a close call when shrapnel from bombing fell around the car in which he was traveling.

  “I gave my uniform to someone else because I couldn’t bear to see it hanging up in my house,” he said. “I lasted five or six months and then one day my feet took me to the club and I had to pay ... for a new outfit.”

  Yussef Iskander, another athlete in the small Yemeni delegation, said he narrowly escaped death when a shell exploded as he left the hall where he was practicing the martial art of wushu.

  One piece of shrapnel pierced his foot, another killed one of his teammates and a third forced the amputation of another’s foot.

  The explosion happened in Taez, a city in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula country.

  “Because of the injury, I stopped training from 2015 to 2021, but eventually resumed to raise the Yemeni flag in China,” he said.

  A silver medalist at the Arab Games in Beirut in 2014, Iskander, who is expecting his second child, trains for about an hour a day.

  “China has been preparing for the Games for a year and a half and we’ve been preparing for just one month here,” he said in Hangzhou.

  Iskander rejects the idea of emigrating, but judoka Abdalla Faye, 29, wants to escape his war-ravaged homeland.

  “I want to go to France, where judo is practiced, where I can flourish, but I have no money,” he said.

  The Sana’a resident has two jobs, alternating between delivering ready-made meals and working as a security guard in the rebel-held capital.

  “I go to training exhausted, which doesn’t help me prepare for big tournaments,” said Faye, who came 17th in the under-73kg category at the Games.

  Yemen’s medal tally in Hangzhou was zero with the multisport event halfway through, but al-Hamadani hopes his country can take part in the 2024 Paris Olympics, saying he has already received invitations for athletics, boxing and swimming.
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