Tsimanouskaya at the Polish embassy: what happened on 2 August 2021
A Belarusian sprinter's refusal to board a flight home pulled Tokyo, Warsaw and Kyiv into a single story.
What happens when an athlete at the Tokyo Games refuses to go home? On 2 August 2021, Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya answered that question by entering the Polish embassy in Tokyo, after declining to board a flight to Belarus at Haneda Airport and asking Japanese police for protection.
The Games, postponed from 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, were running from 23 July to 8 August 2021. Belarus was competing in Tokyo, and the episode unfolded away from the track, at the airport and then at a diplomatic mission.
A regional dimension
Ukraine featured in the story too. Tsimanouskaya's husband had left Belarus and entered Ukraine, which put Kyiv on the map of a case otherwise centred on Tokyo and Warsaw.
The response
The Japanese government said it would take measures to protect her stay in the country. Several European countries, meanwhile, offered her asylum. Her immediate safety was therefore treated as a matter for governments, not only sporting bodies.
The case also stands out in the longer record of Belarus at the Olympics. Tokyo was the country's seventh consecutive Summer Games in the post-Soviet era and, as later became clear, its last as Belarus: it was barred from the 2024 Paris Games, along with Russia, because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
