The Long Game: Sports Stories of Courage and Conviction

Aliya Soomro was not yet ten years old when she heard that a boxing coach near her home was training young girls. Aliya lives in Lyari, a densely populated neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan known for gang violence and dangerous streets. When she heard about this gym, where she could learn to box, Aliya jumped at the chance. And while her conservative family and community were concerned at first, boxing soon proved to be a path out of poverty for Aliya. Now, other young girls in Lyari are getting the chance to follow their athletic dreams.

Eric Murangwa Eugene was a 19-year-old goalkeeper for Rwanda’s most beloved football team when the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsis began. On the first day of the genocide, soldiers came to Eric’s house, looking for enemies of the state. But one of the soldiers saw an album filled with photos of his time with the team, and Eric was saved. Eric spent much of the genocide in hiding, helped by his teammates and supporters of his football club, many of them Hutus. Today, Eric is the founder of an organization called Football for Hope, Peace and Unity. It uses football as a tool to promote tolerance, unity and reconciliation among Rwandan youth in order to prevent tragedies like the 1994 genocide from ever happening again.

Earlier this year, Ibtihaj Muhammad traveled to Morocco to meet with 18 young sports entrepreneurs living and working in North Africa. The program is called “My Sport, My Future,” and it’s run by an organization called TIBU Africa. TIBU was founded in 2010 by former Morocco national basketball team player Mohamed Amine Zariat. It started as a program that used basketball to connect with underprivileged youth, but it’s grown to be much more than that. To date, TIBU has served more than 250,000 people including girls in rural areas, kids with motion disabilities, migrants, refugees, youth and women. Now, Amine is hoping to inspire others to use sport as an agent for change in all of Africa.

At first glance, the protests in Iran might not seem like a sports story. But in the lead up to the Qatar World Cup, there were calls to bar Iran from the tournament altogether, over the government’s treatment of women. Women in Iran have more rights than women in a place like Afghanistan. They have access to education. They can vote. They can be elected to Parliament. But they can’t choose whether or not to wear the hijab. And until recently, they couldn’t attend sporting events in person. That’s how sports and women’s rights came to be intertwined in Iran.

In 2015, Rebecca Rusch and Huyen Nguyen set out to bike 1,200 miles of the Ho Chi Minh Trail as strangers from once-opposing countries. They two cyclists navigated the infamous trail through Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, carrying the weight of their personal connections to the land. The journey challenged not only their physical capabilities, but their notions of war, pride, sorrow, and loss. Rusch planned the ride in honor of her father who died in 1972 while flying a fighter jet over Laos. Rusch was three years old when her father died. Nguyen helped Rusch through the sometimes dangerous terrain, carrying her own personal stories of the war. What did they face, head on, as they rode together?

When Michael Lahoud was 6 years old, he fled civil war in Sierra Leone and came to the United States. He felt scared and alone. But with help from his favorite sport—soccer—Lahoud was able to make friends, find a community, and earn a college scholarship. Years later, while playing professionally in the United States, Lahoud was approached by a stranger who asked him, “How would you like to change the world?” For Lahoud, the answer was simple. He decided to build a school in Sierra Leone and use his platform as a professional soccer player to make sure that what happened in his home country never happens again.

For more information on how to support schools in Sierra Leone visit Schools for Salone.

Bobsledder Kaillie Humphries won her third gold medal at the 2022 Winter Olympics. But, for the first time, instead of singing along to “O Canada” during the medal ceremony, Kaillie belted out the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Kaillie left Team Canada in 2019, after she says her federation failed to act on her allegations of verbal and mental abuse against the team’s coach. Now Kaillie is hoping her story helps to reform the Olympic system and help other athletes stand up against negative coaching and abuse.

When Lina Khalifeh was young, all she wanted to do was play football with the boys in her neighborhood in Jordan. But the boys bullied her, and her family punished her for getting into fights. That’s when Lina’s mother signed her up to learn taekwondo. Later, with 20 national and international gold medals under her belt, Lina became frustrated with the violence against women she saw all around her. She created SheFighter, the first women-only self-defense school in the Middle East. Lina works with women all over the world to learn self-defense and inspires them to take on active roles in society. Since the program’s inception in 2012, SheFighter has trained more than 25,000 women in 35 countries.

Robi Alam is a Rohingya refugee. His family fled violence and persecution in Myanmar. A decade later, Robi was born in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Life was hard in the camps, and Robi and his friends would wrap rubber bands around a wad of plastic bags and play football until the ball fell apart. When Robi was 10, his family emigrated to Australia, where most people have never even heard of the plight of the Rohingya. To help ease their transition, Robi and some of his fellow Rohingya started playing football again, informally at first, in nearby parks. But their passion grew, and they formed an official club. They call themselves Rohingya United, and their goal is to raise awareness of the Rohingya issue. Now there are Rohingya football teams scattered across Australia, as well as in Canada, the US, and other countries.

On today’s show, host Ibtihaj Muhammad interviews Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, about the efforts she and others in the league have made to keep the spotlight on Brittney Griner. Griner, an eight-time WNBA All-Star, was sentenced in August to nine years in a Russian prison after pleading guilty to drug charges. Russian officials said they found vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage at Moscow’s airport.

In the conversation, Ogwumike talks about the injustice of Griner’s case. She also delves into her successes in negotiating the WNBA’s most recent union contract and her quest to end pay inequity in the sport.