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Iowa women welcome female Muslim athletes to RAGBRAI
By Lily Abromeit, The Gazette
Jul. 16, 2015 8:26 pm
Last summer, 12 women who went to high school together in Urbandale hatched a plan. To mark their 50th birthdays in the coming year, they would ride RAGBRAI 43 next week - but with a few extras.
The women, some of whom still live in the state, decided to sponsor nine female Muslim athletes to fly to Iowa to participate in the ride.
'Our mission was to really promote female participation in sports as a female right and our hope was to kind of bring that to the attention and help inspire other women to pursue athletics,” said Nanci Freed, who lives in Cincinnati and will be working the social media and logistics of the team.
Freed said they got the idea from one member of the group, Mara Gubuan. Gubuan, now living in New York, is the co-founder of Shirzanan Global, a non-profit that promotes Muslim female athletic participation.
'Thinking about our upcoming milestone 50th birthday … we just decided (to) do something physically challenging,” Gubuan said. 'We just decided, let's make it physically challenging but also socially relevant.”
For RAGBRAI, the group is sponsoring nine female Muslim athletes who have reached successes in their own countries. They will come to Iowa and stay with the Iowa women and ride alongside them.
The athletes range from an Olympic weight lifter to a soccer player from Afghanistan to a snowboarder from Iran. The women will be coming from Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Afghanistan, as well as from a few places around the United States.
'We wanted to identify and partner with women who had already broken the stereotypes,” Freed said. 'They come to represent that it is possible.”
Gubuan said she hopes these women will inspire other young women and girls, especially Muslim girls, to pursue athletics.
Freed said they had to go through all of the logistics of getting the women here, like applying for and obtaining visas and credentials. But everything came through approved last week and the Muslim women arrived Thursday. The whole team will participate in a short ride Friday in Des Moines.
Sue Thomas, who lives in Marion, said she has been training for most of the year as this will be her first RAGBRAI.
She said she's nervous about the challenges.
'I think it will be extremely challenging and then also I have a partner who is a global cyclist from Jordan, I'm her American partner, so that should be challenging because I'm sure she'll be a lot better than me,” Thomas said.
Freed said while the Muslim women most likely haven't had to do rigorous extra training, they will face some of their own challenges.
'The good news is that they are young, in- shape athletes that have been training so they're probably in pretty good shape. But they're traveling from across the world,” she said, adding that for many of them it will be the end of Ramadan, meaning they will be ending a fast.
Despite the challenges expected for everyone, Thomas said she is excited to be reunited with her old classmates as well as be exposed to different cultures.
”This is probably one of the most diverse teams they've ever had,” she said, 'so that should be kind of historical.”