Egyptians again take to streets, this time in spandex
Three years after military crackdown, youth-driven fitness craze takes hold
CAIRO — Egypt’s young people have once again taken to the streets. This time, though, they are in spandex and on bicycles, in kayaks and sculls on the Nile, doing street workouts in the slums of Giza or CrossFit exercises in makeshift rooftop gyms.
More than five years after overwhelming numbers filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, deposing President Hosni Mubarak, and three years since the military crackdown that ousted the elected Muslim Brotherhood president and jailed protesters by the thousands, a fitness craze has taken hold. It is a stark departure for a nation that is the 17th most obese in the world, where fast-food joints proliferate and smoking is still the norm in restaurants — and everywhere else.
Egyptian squash players are among the best in the world, and privileged families have long pushed their children to take up sports, but the new focus on fitness is drawing in people from all classes, with substantial numbers of women, too, and is more about exercise for exercise than about games or competition. Many Egyptians see it as a direct outgrowth of the withering of the political revolution under President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.
“Why now, and where does this come from? Clearly, it’s connected with the withdrawal from public life by young people,” said Ezzedine C. Fishere, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo who has seen the trend take hold in his family. Fishere said he goes to the gym regularly, his daughter wears a Fitbit and his ex-wife works out, too.
After the military crackdown, he said, “everyone who had participated in 2011 started to move to the private sphere, some took refuge in depression, some in nihilistic activities and many in fitness — not just fitness, but taking care of oneself.”
Ramy A. Saleh, who pioneered CrossFit in Egypt, opening the first franchise right after the revolution, said simply, “The young people can’t go out demonstrating, but they can go out to run.”
It did not take the military-dominated government long to take notice — approvingly. Soon after assuming office in 2014, el-Sissi, the former commanding general of Egypt’s military, led cadets from the military academy on a wellpublicized bicycle ride around Cairo.
“President Sissi wanted to give a couple messages to the youth, that he’s supporting them,” said Ibrahim Nofal, a cofounder of the Egypt Sports Network, which promotes sports development.
Back in 2014, a jogger along the Nile River would have had the broken sidewalks and potholed roads to himself; these days they are often crowded by 7 a.m. Cairo Runners, founded soon after the revolution in 2011, fields thousands of joggers every Friday, and thousands more join bicycle rides on the weekends — despite the city’s notoriously dangerous traffic.
When Nirvana Zaher, an Egyptian fitness trainer and consultant, ran a Gold’s Gym franchise in Cairo in 2008, it was practically the only scene in town for fitness fanatics. The revolution changed that, she said, and not just because young people turned from politics to sports. “A lot of Egyptians didn’t realize their true nature before the revolution, didn’t realize we could do things we’d never imagine,” Zaher said.