As his dreams of competing for a taekwondo Olympic medal evaporated in the frantic final seconds of his second contest of the day, Omar Yaser Ismail fell to his knees in disbelief. Even after his opponent, Adrián Vicente, comforted him and the audience recognised his immense efforts with a long, warm ovation, he remained rooted to the spot, unable to come to terms with defeat.
Ismail’s ambitions were far greater than his final result in the taekwondo 58kg weight division on Wednesday, but as one of eight athletes representing Palestine at the Olympic Games, simply making it to Paris was a significant feat.
While seven of the Palestinian athletes secured their Olympic berths through the International Olympic Committee’s quota system, which offers placements to underrepresented Olympic committees, the 18-year-old qualified through his performances at the Asian Taekwondo Olympic qualification tournament. Ismail is the first Palestinian athlete to ever directly qualify for the Olympics in any combat sport.
His family hails from the West Bank but his parents emigrated to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in 2003, two years before he was born. At a time when Israel’s air attacks and ground incursion into Gaza have killed more than 30,000 Palestinian people, including estimates of more than 300 Palestinian athletes and sporting officials, Ismail and other Palestinian competitors have used their platforms to shed light on the plight of the population they represent. “This is all for Palestine,” he said. “It’s true that we play and fight, but the real heroes are the children of Palestine and the children of Gaza.”
As a child, Ismail came into contact with taekwondo by chance; he would go off to watch his brother and friends at their training sessions. It soon became his own sport. From those beginnings, Ismail found himself at the Olympics under the glorious dome roof of the Grand Palais, a stunning setting for professional sport, on an opening day of a taekwondo competition ripe with meaningful storylines.
In his first match of the competition, the qualifying round, Ismail faced the refugee athlete Hadi Tiranvalipour. Formerly representing Iran, Tiranvalipour was a member of his country’s national team and also a sports presenter until he was fired from his job after speaking out in favour of women’s freedom. As he left Iran, his travels would take him through Turkey to Italy, where he spent his first 10 days living in a forest.
The opening day also threw a spotlight on the first Saudi woman to qualify by merit for the Olympics. Dunya Abutaleb took to taekwondo at a time when Saudi Arabia had banned women from entering sport clubs and girls from playing sports at school. After being introduced to taekwondo by her father, she spent her formative years training only with boys and wearing a head covering to disguise herself as a boy. After her gender was revealed, she was barred from the club and had to train at home with her brother’s coach.
Abutaleb has since built a notable career, winning bronze medals at the 2022 world taekwondo championships and the Asian Games. On Wednesday, she won her opening bout against Abishag Semberg of Israel, an Olympic bronze medallist from Tokyo 2020.
It seemed for some time that Abutaleb was on her way to a routine defeat but, with 19 seconds to go in the second round, she gave a full exhibition of her resilience as a sweet kick connected with Semberg’s head. After narrowly edging out that round, she dominated the final round. After the bout, Abutaleb did not shake Semberg’s hand.
Although Abutaleb lost her second match to Panipak Wongpattanakit comprehensively, the Thai fighter eventually reached (and won) the final, which allowed Abutaleb into the repechage, where she eventually fell to Iran’s Mobina Nematzadeh in the bronze medal match.
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Meanwhile, after efficiently defeating Tiranvalipour in the qualifying round, Ismail faced Vicente, a bronze medallist at last year’s world championships, in the round of 16. Although Vicente dominated the opening round of their contest, Ismail established a narrow lead in the next round with five seconds to go, a third round seemingly beckoning. Instead, the Spaniard landed two fierce kicks to snatch victory right at the close. After the clock counted him out, Ismail was inconsolable.
Eventually, he departed the arena. He still looked devastated as he walked through the media zone alone without stopping for any interviews. But he left the Grand Palais showing that he can be competitive with quality opposition, that he has a promising future and, perhaps most notably, that at only 18 he is now flying his flag on stages that no other Palestinian athlete is currently able to get to.