Tokyo Olympics: Grandmother warned sprinter not to return to Belarus

The grandmother of sprinter Krystina Tsimanouskaya urged her not to return to Belarus after the athlete criticised her coaching staff.

The athlete has been offered asylum in Poland after officials from Belarus tried to escort her out of Tokyo and back to Minsk and said she wants to continue her sporting career.

She spoke to reporters at a news conference in Warsaw.

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the belarusian athlete christina timorushkaia has said that she feared she would be sent to a psychiatric hospital or jail after she publicly criticized her coaches poland gave the olympian a humanitarian visa this is after belarus team officials attempted to force her to return early from tokyo she’s been speaking at a news conference in warsaw today when i was in olympic village some coach and some men from our team they come to my room and they say that i should say that i have some injury and come back to home if i will not do it then i can get some problem in my country and they don’t know which one problem but um after this day they also come to my room and they say that i have no chance to run 200 meters and i should to come back to home and it’s not their decision and they just should to do it and when i pick up my clothes and go to the car my grandmother she called me and she said you can’t come back to home because on the tv they say a lot of bad words about you that you have some mental pro problems and maybe you can go to the some hospital in belarus or maybe to jail we don’t know well skies moscow correspondent diana magnay has been following the story and joins us now so diana belarus was clearly not an option for this athlete to return to but how much safer is she going to be in poland well a lot safer than she would be if she was in belarus i think it’s very clear that if she had gone back having basically criticized her coaching team on instagram um she would have faced reprisals and we could only guess what those would be but they could be detention um a possible trial on fabricated criminal charges you know it’s not something that clearly she was prepared to do even though this defection essentially was not planned she made very clear it was something that she had to decide based on these threats that she got from her team then in discussion with her parents back in belarus with her husband with her grandmother she made the decision as they were essentially driving her to the airport that she would try and seek asylum with the japanese police rather than go back home but you see there the nature of the threats made against her and the way that belarusian state tv propaganda went into overdrive about uh her supposedly having mental problems and that’s why she would no longer be running in the olympics but we saw earlier in the week a terrible incident in kiev ukraine where a bella russian activist was found hanged the police are still investigating but one of their possibilities is that this was murder dressed up as suicide and that is certainly what most of the belarusian diaspora believe that it was so questions about the safety of belarusians in exile are you know it’s not guaranteed any belarusian living outside of belarus at the moment does not want to tell me when i speak to them where exactly they are because it is clear that alexander lukashenko the president’s cohorts his security forces operate beyond belarus’s borders but she is now in poland she says she feels safe her husband is on route from kiev to join her and she says that the polls are giving her support in terms of pursuing her sporting career that fundamentally she is a sports person she’s never been interested in politics that is not her priority but that she is prepared to help in any way that she can other athletes in belarus who might find themselves in a similar situation uh but the person that she was there in that press conference with a bella russian opposition politician was keen to distance her from the politics but to make the point that what we’re seeing in belarus at the moment is the worst political repressions in europe than we’ve seen since world war ii so it’s no surprise really that she didn’t want to go back home