Sport
Hala Al-Qadi won Palestine's first women's medal at the Asian Games
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The Asian Games open in Japan on 19 September, and Palestine will be in the parade of forty-five nations that walks into the stadium at Nagoya.
It goes back to a continental competition it left, three years ago in Hangzhou, holding something it had never held before: a medal won by a Palestinian woman.
Hala Al-Qadi won it in the karate hall on 5 October, bronze in the women's 68-kilogram kumite. She was twenty-two. Nobody from Palestine had done it before her, and the country's entire medal haul from that edition was hers.
Deir Istiya to the tatami#
Al-Qadi was born in Ramallah in July 2001 and grew up in Deir Istiya, the village northwest of Salfit in the occupied West Bank. She was seven when she first walked into a karate class, and it was meant to be a way to fill a summer.
She stayed. Through the local circuit, then the regional one, then the national team, she kept the weight class she still fights — 68 kilograms, where the reach is long and the exchanges are decided in fractions of a second.
She has been studying civil engineering at Birzeit University in the same years, which is its own kind of double training: examinations in one language, championships in another, and travel permits standing between her and both.
Training is the only outlet for me in the current circumstances.
Hala Al-Qadi, November 2023
She said it a month after the medal, when the war had begun and every Palestinian athlete's calendar had been rewritten around funerals.
What the delegation carries to Nagoya#
Palestine took seventy athletes to Hangzhou across fifteen sports — sixty-two men and eight women, with the footballers the largest contingent. The delegation for Nagoya has not been published yet.
What is known is the ground it comes from. The Palestinian Football Association counts 265 sports facilities damaged or destroyed and 1,009 people from the sporting community killed. The Palestinian Olympic Committee has agreed with the International Olympic Committee on Olympic Solidarity scholarships for athletes training toward these Games, which is how several of them are able to train at all.
The twentieth Asian Games run to 4 October, 469 medal events across 43 sports, the first edition Japan has hosted since Hiroshima in 1994.
Somewhere in the karate draw there will be a Palestinian bout, and the woman who won the last one is twenty-five now.
