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Ahead of the 2024 Olympics, Bahrain’s Olympic Committee has announced that it will send its strongest ever team to Paris.
“We have an extraordinary group of the greatest athletes of all time representing Bahrain in Paris,” Sheikh Issa bin Ali bin Khalifa, vice president of the Bahrain Olympic Committee, told Reuters.
“Bahrain performed well in the last Asian Games, winning a total of 12 gold medals, three silver and five bronze medals, which confirms that they have a strong foundation and positive indicators to win medals in Paris.”
The Gulf kingdom is sending a 14-person delegation, including eight women, of whom 11 are foreign-born, highlighting the authoritarian regime’s long-held strategy of importing athletes to boost its Olympic medal tally.
Bahrain made its Olympic debut at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and has participated in every subsequent Games, most recently the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The Kingdom has won a total of four Olympic medals: two gold and two silver, all won by naturalized African distance runners.
Bahrain’s first medalist was Ethiopian-born Mariam Yusuf Jamal, who won bronze in the 1500 metres at the London 2012 Games. Jamal was later upgraded to gold after the original gold and silver medallists were disqualified. Four years later in Rio de Janeiro, Kenyans Ruth Jebet and Younis Kirwa won Bahrain’s first gold and silver medals. Jebet won gold in the 3000 metres steeplechase and Kirwa won silver in the marathon. Ethiopian-born Karkidan Gezahegné won silver in the 10,000 metres at the Tokyo 2020 Games.
The Kingdom’s attention is now turned to Paris, where several foreign athletes are the favorites to win medals: Kenyan-born Winfred Yavi is one of the favorites to win the women’s 3,000m hurdles after winning the 2023 world championships, while Dagestan-born freestyle wrestler Ahmed Tazdinov won the men’s 97kg world title last year.
“Tazdinov is preparing well for the Olympics and hopes to add an Olympic medal to Bahrain’s medal haul,” said Bahrain Wrestling Federation President Abdulredda Abdulhussein Haji. “After winning gold at the World Championships in Belgrade, we are all optimistic that Tazdinov will perform well in Paris after his impressive results this year and last.”
Bahrain is not the only country to import foreign athletes to boost its medal tally — Qatar, the UAE and Turkey are known to have adopted a similar strategy — but the kingdom’s approach stands in stark contrast to its policy of stripping citizenship from dissidents and opposition leaders it sees as a threat to the regime.
Structured as a modern Arab monarchy, Bahrain’s politics are dominated by the ruling Khalifa family. By 2010, more than half of the ministerial posts in the government were held by relatives of the current King, Hamad Khalifa. This inherent lack of political freedom and equality for the Shiite population played a key role in the 2011 Bahraini uprising, which was part of the Arab Spring revolutionary protest movement that took place across the Middle East and North Africa.
Thousands of people gathered in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, to protest for greater rights and a democratic political system that could take into account Bahrain’s invisible Shiite majority. This resulted in deadly clashes between government forces and protesters. With the support of Saudi Arabian forces, Bahrain forcibly restored order, consolidated the monarchy, and then began a crackdown on all forms of dissent. Peaceful demonstrators were jailed and others tortured and exiled from their homeland.
Among those accused of human rights violations at the time was Sheikh Nasser Al Khalifa, King Hamad’s son, who was then president of the Bahrain Olympic Committee. Nasser reportedly used his powerful position to remove athletes who participated in the protests, leading to the arrest and, in some cases, torture of around 120 athletes, 27 of whom were from the Bahrain national team.
Since then, Bahrain has continued to crack down on all forms of dissent, with citizenship revocation being one of the country’s preferred tactics dating back to 2012, when the country stripped 31 of its citizens of their citizenship. Since then, hundreds of Bahrainis have had their citizenship stripped, leaving many stateless.
Meanwhile, the Kingdom continues to rely on sport for political gain, a mechanism to distort reality and present a fabricated image of peace and prosperity on the international stage.
Bahrain has been finding new ways to transform its relatively unknown island nation into a destination for tourists and sports enthusiasts ever since it became the first Gulf Arab state to host a Formula One race in 2004. Recognizing its limited presence in the Olympics, for example, Bahrain began issuing passports to athletes from Africa and elsewhere in the hopes of winning its first medals, which it did in 2012, just months after cracking down on Arab Spring protesters.
The current president of Bahrain’s Olympic Committee is Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Sheikh Nasser’s brother and the driving force behind Bahrain’s long-term investment in martial arts.
In 2015, Sheikh Khalid funded the development of KHK MMA, the island nation’s first fully functioning MMA fight club and training facility. He also founded Bahrain’s first MMA promotion, Brave Combat Federation, which has since emerged as the most prominent MMA organization in the Arab world.
Sheikh Khalid was a former military man who fell in love with martial arts and made it his mission to develop the sport in his country. In addition to serving as president of the Bahrain Olympic Committee, he has competed in two amateur mixed martial arts bouts and trains regularly at KHK facilities.
Sheikh Khalid has also used his MMA fight club and organization as a means to improve diplomatic relations with dictators such as Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, with Sheikh Khalid hosting Kadyrov in Bahrain as part of an exchange between KHK MMA and Kadyrov’s Akhmat MMA fight club.
The trend of naturalizing foreign-born fighters has also extended to Sheikh Khalid’s MMA institution, with several of KHK’s coaches and fighters later becoming Bahraini nationals and representing the country in various international competitions – a strategy that Bahrain may resort to again as it looks to win more medals in Paris.
The tragic irony these naturalized athletes face is that they represent a country that exploits the cheap labor of their fellow countrymen while stripping locals of their citizenship, whom they deem a threat to the stability of the monarchy. Standing on the podium and basking in the glory of their achievements, they embody a country that uses sport as an instrument of soft power and citizenship as a means to separate the useful from the disloyal.
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