NAGOYA: Imagine training to compete at the Asian Games, in double sculls rowing. An event where your endurance and the precise coordination you have with your teammate, developed through hours and hours spent together in the water, means everything. Now, imagine doing that, except there is no water and no teammate. All you have is an ergometer.
That, and the sound of missiles dropping outside her home in the Iranian city of Hamadan, was all that Kimia Zarei had to get in shape for the ongoing Games in Nagoya. Yet on Tuesday, she and her partner Zeinab Norouzi won gold in the women's lightweight double sculls event.
Iran's women rowers are among the strongest at the Games here. They are winning almost everything. The war back home could not break their spirit or resolve. Yes, their training was disrupted by bombs and missiles, and they had to train alone at their homes, almost like it was the COVID pandemic all over again. Yet, their medal bag here has two golds, two silvers and a bronze. “We were bombed everyday,” Zarei remembers her Games preparation. "When I was in our home, I was preparing to start training and I would hear the bombs. It was close to our home and when you go to the window, you can see everything."
Zarei and her fellow athletes had their practice at Urmia cut short. On the first day of the war, the federation asked each athlete to go back home and they were all given an ergometer to train. "We faced a lot of difficulties after the war began, but we wanted to show that we are strong," said Iranian rowing federation president Mohsen Shadi Naghadeh. "We gave every rower an ergometer so they could continue training at home."
That was very scary for her and her teammates. She trained alone for 45 days. The war made life uncertain. She says they didn’t know what would happen next. “We had six months to Nagoya Asian Games when our country was at war,” she says. “It was something unbelievable, and we didn't expect that. So the thing that we had to do as an athlete, as a team, was just to try and focus on our training, even when we are at our homes." Her partner in lightweight double sculls Zeinab has similar experiences to share. "Every day, we had training sessions in our rooms, 20 kilometers on ergometer."
The duo knows what their gold means to the Iranian people, especially girls seeking to follow in their footsteps. And Kimia says that there will be plenty more, for the life that they live bestow Iranian women with resilience. "Women in Iran have a very strong mindset, and it's because of their lifestyle,” she says. "Most of the responsibilities of life, it doesn't matter if you are single or married, are with women in Iran,” she says. “And all of them are trying their best to be a strong woman and try to nurture a strong child of their own."
It was that strength she drew upon to take the gold at the sprawling Nagaragawa International Regatta Course on Thursday. The victory allowed them to forget the travails back home for a while. And they had earned it.