Egyptian weightlifters Ahmed and Said join female pioneers at Paris Olympics

Competing near garden commemorating French pilot Elisabeth Boselli, they hope to inspire more girls to take up their sport

Sara Ahmed of Egypt on her way to winning gold in the 76kg category at the World Weightlifting Championships in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last year. DBM-Deepbluemedia

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Visitors to the South Paris Arena, where over the Olympics’ climactic days some of the very strongest athletes at the Games will gather, often get there by passing through or around the Elisabeth Boselli Garden.

It’s a pleasant green space in Paris’s 15th arrondissement whose name remembers a great French pioneer.

Boselli flew planes with exceptional skill. For a woman to do so, and for her expertise to be recognised in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, was some feat. It took courage and no little determination. Boselli won many battles en route to becoming the first female to be granted a military pilot’s licence in France. She went on to set records in aviation for steering various types of aircraft higher and faster than any woman – or in some cases any pilot – ever had.

Tempting then, to imagine that Boselli, who died age 91 in 2005, would have looked on approvingly at some of the competitors at the Olympic weightlifting, brave and determined individuals preparing to challenge the laws of gravity inside the arena adjacent to the garden that honours her. Not least the female lifters, almost all of whom have grown up pushing against long-established barriers to participation in elite weightlifting.

In Olympic terms, the sport was for men only for the first century of modern Games, opened up to women after the 20th century had given way to the 21st, with the first female competitions introduced at Sydney in 2000. As it turned out, this would be both a welcome step into modernity and stimulate the revival of a national tradition of excellence in the sport that seemed to have faded away.

That is Egypt’s. Way back in the old, male-only era of Olympic men’s lifting, Egyptians used to set standards. The country’s first-ever gold medal in any Games travelled home from Amsterdam in the safe grip of the weightlifter El Sayed Nosseir in 1928. His compatriots went on to rack up five medals, including two golds in what were then known as the lightweight and middleweight categories at the Berlin Games of 1936.

Post-World War Two, the Egyptian aura remained, Ibrahim Shams upgrading his featherweight-class bronze from Berlin to a gold in the bantamweight in London in 1948, one of the country’s two first-place prizes there.

Yet for the next 60 years, Egypt would not medal again in the sport. China and the countries of the former Soviet Union rose in power and influence and not until the Beijing Games in 2008 would Egypt have another place on a weightlifting podium.

For Abeer Abdelrahman, the actual wait would be extended still further. Her bronze in the 69kg category in Beijing and then her silver in the 75kg at London in 2012 were assigned retrospectively, after medals had been stripped from rivals who had finished ahead of her. They were later disqualified for doping violations and her fifth-place finishes upgraded.

Abdelrahman had set a marker. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Sara Ahmed followed, becoming the first Egyptian, the first Arab woman to be draped with an Olympic weightlifting medal at a Games. She accepted her bronze in the 71kg category with a nod to history: “I hope this will help re-establish Egypt as a successful weightlifting nation,” she said.

And she added: “I hope it encourages other girls to take up the sport, that a new weightlifting generation can be born, a new beginning."

Eight years on, Sara Ahmed, now 26, is back at an Olympics, and there with World Championship titles from the last two years to her name. She has a mission to fulfil, having missed out on Tokyo and the previous Games because the Egyptian Federation was serving a general suspension imposed for other athletes’ doping offences at a 2016 youth and junior event.

She has arrived in Paris strongly tipped for a medal in the 81kg class, which begins on Saturday. She can survey a real legacy, too. On Friday, Egypt’s 21-year-old Naema Said, a gold medallist at the 2021 World Championships, competes in the 71kg.

They are among the pathfinders for what has been a notable growth in female interest in the sport both across Egypt and much of the Mena region.

“It’s important to have inspiring individuals like Naema,” says Eshaq Ebrahim Eshaq, president of the Bahrain Weightlifting Federation, executive board member of the Asian Federation and among those driving major global events towards the Gulf.

“What’s important is that old stigmas around women and weightlifting have been broken, the idea that somehow it is not a healthy sport for girls,” Eshaq tells The National.

To a generation who have grown up exposed to the exercise benefits of crossfit, whose regimens borrow heavily from the snatch and clean-and-jerk, weightlifting seems less remote and arcane than perhaps it used to, Eshaq points out. Stories such as those of Sara Ahmed, who was encouraged by a father steeped in the sport to pursue her interest, also help erode old pre-conceptions.

“Family support is often vital, and I see more and more of that among young weightlifters,” says Eshaq, who hopes that with more high-profile weightlifting events being staged in Mena countries, the more appealing the idea of participation becomes. The last world championships were hosted by Saudi Arabia, the next will be staged in Bahrain; the 2026 world juniors are earmarked for Egypt.

For now, there’s the vivid spectacle, beamed into homes where daughters and parents gather around their televisions, of the weightlifting at sport’s greatest showpiece.

There will be drama in Paris’s 15th arrondissement over the coming days, fresh records established and, amid much grunting and exhalation, the gripping suspense of seeing exceptional athletes try to heave up more than twice their own body weight.

And for a couple of the courageous women involved, they’ll be bearing the hopes of tens of millions of Egyptians, too.