How Afghan women's cycling team escaped Kabul • FRANCE 24 English

Key Concepts

• Gender Apartheid: A term used to describe the systematic segregation and oppression of women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, characterized by the total removal of rights to education, employment, and public movement.
• Exfiltration: The clandestine process of removing individuals from a hostile environment (in this case, Afghanistan) to safety.
• Mobility Justice: The concept that cycling for Afghan women was not merely a sport, but a radical act of reclaiming public space and transportation rights.
• UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale): The world governing body for sports cycling, criticized in the interview for its handling of the Afghan cycling crisis and its internal ethics investigations.
• Afghan Women’s Sports Archive: A project initiated to preserve the history, oral testimonies, and legacies of Afghan female athletes to prevent their erasure by the Taliban.

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1. The Evacuation Process and Methodology

Shannon Galpin details a grassroots, high-risk operation to evacuate members of the Afghan national cycling team and independent female cyclists.

• Methodology: The process involved moving individuals in small groups (typically 4–5 people) by car across the country to the Pakistani border.
• Logistics: Evacuees were placed in safe houses for periods ranging from eight months to two years before being resettled in over a dozen countries.
• Scope: Galpin personally managed the evacuation of hundreds of individuals, including both women and men from the national teams, continuing this work for years after the initial fall of Kabul.

2. Critique of Institutional Response

Galpin presents a sharp critique of the cycling establishment, specifically the UCI, regarding their role in the crisis:

• Lack of Support: Despite having significant financial resources and global networks, major cycling organizations failed to assist in the evacuation efforts, leaving the burden on individual activists.
• Performative Actions: Galpin argues that the UCI’s public efforts—such as bringing Afghan cyclists to a race in Aigle, Switzerland—were misleading. She claims many of the women featured in these events were already safe or had been evacuated by her own network, yet the UCI took credit for their rescue.
• Ethics Commission Failure: The UCI suspended Fazli Ahmad Fazli, the former Afghan Cycling Federation President, for only 15 months following allegations of abuse and corruption. Galpin characterizes this as "lenient at best," noting there were no fines, no reparations for the victims, and no oversight of the suspension.

3. The Reality of Refugee Athletes

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on the post-evacuation lives of these athletes:

• Loss of Sport: Most of the evacuated women are no longer cycling. Galpin identifies this as a "heartbreaking" outcome caused by the extreme financial barriers of the sport (equipment costs) and the psychological trauma of the refugee experience.
• Cultural Significance: Cycling was a "barrier-breaking" activity in Afghanistan. Because it involved women riding in public, it was a direct challenge to the Taliban’s restrictions on mobility. Its loss represents a significant blow to the progress made over the last two decades.

4. The Afghan Women’s Sports Archive

To combat the erasure of history, Galpin is expanding her initial cycling-focused archive into a comprehensive Afghan Women’s Sports Archive.

• Objective: To document the history of women in over 20 sports in Afghanistan.
• Method: Collecting oral histories and media documentation to ensure that the achievements of these women—who were previously recognized as National Geographic Adventurers and Nobel Peace Prize nominees—are preserved for future generations.

5. Notable Quotes

• "They chose to gaslight me in the press. They chose to ignore the pleas for help and to make the work of evacuating national cycling team members... all the more difficult and that was unnecessary and cruel." — Shannon Galpin, regarding the lack of support from cycling organizations.
• "Today the women in Afghanistan are living under gender apartheid... they are living under full gender apartheid with no rights for education, school, work, the sound of their voice is banned." — Shannon Galpin, on the current state of human rights in Afghanistan.

Synthesis and Conclusion

The interview highlights a stark contrast between the public narrative of "saving" Afghan cyclists and the reality of the situation. Shannon Galpin emphasizes that while the evacuation of these women was a success, the institutional support was largely absent, and the subsequent integration of these athletes into new countries has been fraught with difficulty. The core takeaway is a call to action: the international community must stop viewing the Afghan crisis as a past event and instead recognize the ongoing "gender apartheid," while actively working to preserve the history and voices of Afghan women who are currently being silenced.