Poland and the Czech Republic have offered asylum to an Olympic athlete from Belarus who escaped efforts to fly her home after she publicly criticised her country’s authorities.
Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, 24, spent a night at a hotel in Haneda airport in Tokyo after appealing online for help to stop being returned to Minsk. She entered the Polish embassy in Tokyo yesterday under Japanese police protection.
Tsimanouskaya plans to leave for Poland in the coming days, Marcin Przydacz, a Polish deputy foreign minister, told Reuters. She was “safe and in good condition”, he said.
Pawel Jablonski, another deputy foreign minister, said: “We have issued a humanitarian visa. I can confirm that we will provide all necessary support in Poland if she wishes to use it.”
Her husband, Arseni Zhdanevich, will join her in Poland, a Belarusian opposition politician based in Warsaw said. “Thanks to the support of the Belarusian Athletes’ Solidarity Foundation, [Tsimanouskaya’s] husband is in Kiev,” Pavel Latushko told Reuters. This was confirmed by a source in the Ukraine interior ministry.
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Latushko said that Belarusian officials had told Tsimanouskaya’s mother that her daughter was a western spy. He added that Tsimanouskaya had told him via text that her mother had been approached by someone from President Lukashenko’s office and asked to persuade her to come home.
Mark Adams, the International Olympic Committee spokesman, said: “We are supporting her and we want to make sure that she gets what she wants. Our duty to her is to make sure she is safe and secure and she’s told us that she is. We were in touch with her last night and today and will continue to do so.”
The sequence of events apparently began with a dispute about athletics rather than politics, although its handling of it reflects the Lukashenko regime’s authoritarianism. Tsimanouskaya had complained on social media about a decision to place her in the 4x400m relay on Thursday, an event for which she had not trained. She was expecting only to race in the 200m.
“It turns out our great bosses as always decided everything for us,” she wrote on Instagram. “They decided to do everything behind my back, despite the fact that I tried to find out this information. Believe me, even though I have never run 400 metres, I would be ready to support the team and the girls and go on the same track with them, BUT, I believe that higher people should have respect for us as athletes!”
Belarus opposition media yesterday leaked a call between Tsimanouskaya and state officials in which the athlete was ordered home. The Meduza website said it was with Yury Moiseyevich, the head Belarusian athletics coach, and Artur Shumakov, another sports official. “We’ve received an order: you’re to fly home today,” Shumak said. “If you want to continue competing for the Belarusian Republic, then listen to what you’re advised to do: come, go home to your parents, or wherever you like. And let this situation slide. Otherwise the more you twitch . . . you know, when a fly is caught in a spiderweb, the more it writhes, the more it gets stuck. That’s how life is organised. You did a stupid thing.”
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By her account, at 5pm on Sunday she was ordered to pack and taken to the airport. The Belarus Olympic Committee said it had decided to “terminate the athlete’s performance” because of her “emotional and psychological state”. Tsimanouskaya insisted that she had not been examined by a doctor.
From the airport she sent a video distributed by the Belarusian Sport Solidarity Foundation (BSSF), an exile organisation supporting athletes. “I am under pressure and they are trying to take me out of the country without my consent. I ask the International Olympic Committee to intervene.”
She was approached by Japanese police and eventually taken to a police station, the hotel and then the Polish embassy. “I explained the situation to a police officer of how I was taken from the Olympic village,” she said in a later statement put out by BSSF. “Now I am in a secure situation.”
Jakub Kulhanek, the Czech foreign minister, said: “I consider the situation around the Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya to be scandalous. The Czech Republic is ready to help . . . we offer her a visa to enter the country so that she can apply for international protection with us. Our embassy in Tokyo is also ready to help.”
Belarus, a former Soviet state, has been run by the autocratic Lukashenko since 1994. Last year he faced protests, which some athletes joined, after an election widely accepted to have been rigged. His son Viktor is president of the Belarus Olympic Committee.
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The first ever Olympic defection occurred at the 1948 London Games where the Czech gymnastics coach Marie Provazníková led her team to a gold medal. She refused to return to Prague, pointing to the absence of “freedom of speech, of the press or of assembly” in her homeland, which was a Cold War Soviet satellite. She moved to the United States and died in New York in 1991 aged 100, having lived to see the Velvet Revolution of 1989 overthrow communism in Czechoslovakia.
In 1956, weeks before the opening of the Melbourne Olympics, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and brutally suppressed the anti-communist uprising. The Games involved an emotional water polo game, known as the Blood in the Water match, in which the Hungarian team beat the USSR, and in which a Russian player punched one of his opponents. At the end of the Games, 48 Hungarian athletes, supported by members of the Hungarian diaspora in Australia, chose not to return home. Many of the defectors ended up settling in the United States.
In 2012, during the London Olympics, seven athletes from Cameroon — a footballer, a swimmer, and five boxers — disappeared from the athletes’ village. The boxers turned up a week later at a south London gym called the Double Jab. They were all eventually allowed to stay. One of them, Thomas Essomba, settled in Sunderland and won the English bantamweight title in March 2018.
