Thursday, November 25, 2021
Belarus athlete threatened in exile
“We’ll break your arms and legs”
At the Olympic Games Kristina Timanowskaja publicly criticized her coach – and is said to be sent back to her native Belarus against her will. The sprinter fears the authoritarian regime and manages to escape. She is still being attacked and threatened.
Belarusian sprinter Kristina Timanowskaja is still threatened more than three months after fleeing the Olympic Games in Tokyo to Poland. “I’m scared. And I keep receiving threats, including on Instagram. ‘We’ll break your arms and legs,’ they write,” said the 35-year-old in an interview with Stern magazine.
During the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Timanovskaya said she had been put under pressure by her trainer and the deputy head of the national training center. She was supposed to fly home against her will before her 200-meter race after publicly criticizing her coach for a sporting decision.
Fearing the consequences in authoritarian Belarus, she turned to the police and finally found help at the Polish embassy. The decision “completely shook her life”, says Timanovskaya: “It brought me a lot of hatred and threats. But I would do the same again today.”
Timanowskaja’s grandmother had warned her not to return to her home country. “As soon as I landed in Belarus, I should be taken to a psychiatric clinic. Everything was prepared,” said the athlete. The athlete feared she would suffer a fate similar to that of the oppositionist Raman Pratasewitsch, whom the Lukashenko regime arrested in May after the forced landing of a Ryanair plane in Minsk and forced to make a public confession: “What they did with Pratasewitsch, shocked us all in Belarus deeply. Even me! After that I knew that the regime is capable of anything. “
At the same time, her husband Arseniy Sdanewitsch, also an athlete, managed to escape from Belarus, which was led by the Lukashenko regime. The couple now live in exile in the Polish capital, Warsaw, under strict security precautions. There Timanowskaja is preparing for her sporty comeback and hopes to soon be able to compete in international competitions for Poland.
She is very worried about her relatives who have stayed behind in Belarus. For her country, she hopes “that there will soon be peace and that all political prisoners will be released,” said Timanovskaya.