- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
INSTANCES of the politics overshadowing sporting events is not rare and the Tokyo Olympics have been no exception.
Algerian judoka Fethi Nourine has withdrawn from the games that kicked off on Friday (23) before the competition started after the draw set him up for a possible encounter with an Israeli opponent.
Nourine was set to face Sudanese opponent Mohamed Abdalrasool for his first bout in the under-73 kilograms (kgs) contest on Monday (26) and would have taken on Israel’s Tohar Butbul in the next round had he won.
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But Nourine decided to give a walkover to Abdalrasool and spoke to a television station in his country late on Thursday (22) that his political support for the Palestinian cause made it impossible to contest an Israeli. He said the Palestinian cause was bigger than all the hard work that was put to reach the quadrennial championship.
“We worked a lot to reach the Olympics… but the Palestinian cause is bigger than all of this,” Nourine said, adding that his decision was “final”.
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It is not the first time that the Algerian judoka has pulled out of a competition to avoid an Israeli opponent. He had withdrawn from the 2019 world championship, which was also held in Tokyo, to avoid fighting Butbul.
It is not the first time that Israeli judokas have faced such a situation at sporting events. At the Rio Olympics in 2016, Egyptian judoka Islam El Shahaby quit the game just hours after refusing to shake hand with his victorious Israeli rival Or Sasson in the first round of the men’s over-100 kgs competition.
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Also, Iranian judokas have come under the scanner in the past for refusing to compete with Israeli counterparts. In April, the International Judo Foundation issued a four-year retrospective ban against the Iranian Judo Foundation over Tehran’s demands that its athletes will not engage with Israeli opponents.
The ban was backdated to start in September 2019 when Iranian judoka Saeid Mollaei left his national team during the world championship in Japan, revealing he was asked to lose matches and withdraw from competitions to avoid facing Israeli opponents.
Israeli athletes’ worst experience at the Olympics though remains the massacre at the 1972 edition in Munich where members from a Palestinian terror group attacked the Israeli contingent and took nine of its members hostage after killing two of them.
The Munich massacre was an attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, by eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, who took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage, after killing two of them. All nine hostages were killed eventually.
