Belarus sprinter feels safe, looks to future
24-year-old runner plans on continuing her career after finding refuge in Poland after Games
WARSAW, Poland — After all the turmoil of the last week, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya finally feels safe.
The Belarusian Olympic sprinter, who found refuge in Poland to avoid punishment at home after criticizing team officials at the Tokyo Games, says she now hopes to focus on how to keep up a world-class running career.
Speaking in an interview Wednesday with the Associated Press at the Olympic Center in Warsaw, the 24-year-old runner said she has already asked Polish officials to help her resume training.
“Life changed in one day, and now we are starting it from scratch in a new country,” she said, speaking with her husband, Arseni Zdanevich, by her side. “We are planning to stay in Poland and continue our careers here.”
“We have turned to the Ministry of Sports, turned to the Polish athletics national team, with issues regarding a coach, a group and a place where I can train and many other issues regarding the continuation of my sports career here in Poland,” she said.
She emphasized that she and her 25-year-old husband, an athletic trainer who also has been her coach, feel it would be a waste to abandon an online training program they launched in Belarus.
“We had so many ideas, we planned it to a tiny detail,” Tsimanouskaya said. “We have put a lot of time and effort in it and we would like to keep it going.”
Tsimanouskaya said she and her husband feel secure in Poland, where they arrived separately last week on humanitarian visas.
“We are definitely safe now because we are under protection,” she said.
The runner recalled the harrowing, confusing moments when she sought Japanese police help at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, when she was being forced by Belarus officials to leave the Summer Games early and return home.
“They didn’t understand first what happened to me,” the runner said of the police. “They thought that I was unwell or lost something. And then I wrote that I was being forcibly taken out of the country and I don’t want that to happen.”
She used her phone to translate the desperate plea for help after her grandmother warned her not to return to Belarus.
The drama began after Tsimanouskaya criticized her team officials, saying on Instagram she was put in the 4x400 relay even though she had never run in the event. She was then barred from competing in the 200-meter race she expected to run in and told to pack her bags.
At home, the standoff set off a massive backlash in state-run media, deepening Tsimanouskaya’s fears that she would face reprisals if she returned.
When she used Google apps to translate her plea to Japanese police, a suspicious Belarusian official asked what was going on. She told him she forgot something at the Olympic village and needed to return. Tsimanouskaya described the feeling of safety she finally had after Japanese police took her away from team officials.
“I think I already felt secure at the airport when I was with the police,” she said.
The standoff again drew global attention to the repressive environment in Belarus, where authorities have unleashed a relentless crackdown on dissent following President Alexander Lukashenko’s being handed a sixth term after the Aug. 9, 2020, presidential vote that the opposition and the West saw as rigged.
Huge protests rocked Belarus, and authorities responded by arresting more than 35,000 people and beating thousands. They have ramped up the clampdown in recent months, raiding hundreds of offices and homes of independent journalists, activists and all those deemed unloyal.
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 27 years, has denounced his opponents as Western stooges. Asked about Tsimanouskaya at a marathon news conference Monday, he claimed “she wouldn’t have done it herself if she hadn’t been manipulated.”