April 19, 2019
Another Iranian athlete has been forced to miss the chance to win a gold medal so as not to have to face an Israeli. The result was that the Israeli won silver and the Iranian was reduced to a bronze.
The Iranian was Saeed Mollai, who has been the world champion in his weight division in judo. Early in February, he appeared in a tournament in Paris. An Israeli, Sagi Muki, won a match and coaches informed Mollai that, if he won his next match against a Kazakh, he would reach the semifinals—but have to face the Israeli, which Iranian rules forbid.
Mollai, with a sullen look, threw his fight against the Kazakh in only 20 seconds by feigning an injury.
However, the 81-kg Iranian judoka amazingly managed to “recover” from the injury to fight for the bronze medal and win it.
Nonetheless, Mollai’s tribulation was not over since he was once again forced to feign injury in order not to stand with the eventual silver medalist, Israel’s Muki, on the podium. A video of his last bout, shows him suddenly collapsing towards the end of the match, clasping his right knee.
Mollai was absent at the medals ceremony since he was allegedly at a hospital treating the injured knee.
“We are going to analyze this case very seriously, because it is not easy to explain how the athlete lost the match, from a methodological point of view,” the president of the International Federation of Judo, Marius Vizer, tweeted.
This was not the first time Mollai feigned an injury at a competition when an Israeli was involved. At the October Abu Dhabi Grand Slam, he quit his quarterfinal match in the middle, clutching his ankle in supposed pain. Then, too, his next opponent would have been Sagi Muki, World Israel News (WIN) reported February 12.
Israel’s premier judoka won gold at that event, and the Jewish state’s national anthem was played for the first time ever in the United Arab Emirates.
Responding to the report of Mollai’s injuries, the commander of the Basij Athletes Organization, General Davoud Azarnoush, said he hopes Israel will be wiped out before the next summer Olympic Games in 2010.
“I hope Israel will be wiped out and annihilated before the next Olympic Games, and all of us will breathe a sigh of relief,” he said in Tehran.
Responding to a question about the possibility of another bout between Mollai and Israel’s Muki in the next Olympics, Gen. Azarnoush said, “The Zionist regime is the Islamic Republic’s redline, and, during the past four decades, our athletes have always firmly stood for the estab-lishment’s ideals, by refraining from competing with them.”
Radio Farda said the redline banning Iranian athletes from competing against Israelis was established in 1983, when the FILA World Wrestling Championships were held in Kiev. The 74-kg Iranian Greco-Roman wrestler, Bijan Seifkhani, faced Robinson Konashvili of Israel and easily won 7-4.
After Seifkhani’s victory, then-Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati ordered the national team to return to Iran immediately. Back in Iran, all members of the national side—athletes, as well as their coaches and technical assistants, and Seifzadeh in particular—were harshly rebuked, it reported.
Many Iranian athletes, including Olympic wrestling gold medalist Rasul Khadem, have repeatedly said that the people of Palestine are not aware of the “sacrifice” Iranian athletes make in their name.
“If we must continue with the policy of no-competition against the Zionist regime’s athletes, the responsibility cannot fall on the shoulders of the coach and the athlete. Forcing an athlete to accept defeat or run around all night looking for a doctor’s note is not right,” Khadem said while he was president of the Iranian Wrestling Federation
The comments were dismissed and deplored by Azarnoush and his boss, ultra-conservative hardliner Brigadier General Gholam-Hossein Gheibparvar, as “testing waters” for establishing relations with Israel.
“The legs of those who walk in that direction will be broken,” Gheibparvar cautioned last year. Khadem was forced to resign.
Meanwhile, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi lauded two Iranians for avoiding Israelis. Just last month, he received and kissed on the forehead teenage chess player Aryan Gholami for refusing to play an Israeli in a chess match in Sweden. Earlier, he lauded an Iranian wrestler, Alireza Karimi-Machiani, for feigning injury to avoid facing an Israeli counterpart in the quarterfinal of the U-23 World Championship, in the 86-kilogram category, in November 2017.
Karimi-Machiani’s decision to avoid facing Uri Kalashnikov of Israel, according to Khamenehi, was “a valuable praiseworthy act.”
Later, Khamenehi received Karimi-Machiani and presented him with one of his own onyx rings.
Khamenehi later tweeted in broken English that “there will be nothing as Zionist regime by the next 25 years. Secondly, until then, struggling, heroic and jihadi morale will leave no moment of serenity for Zionists.”
Two years after the comments, Khamenehi’s close allies unveiled a digital countdown chronometer in Tehran, showing 8,411 days remaining to what they said would be the “destruction of Israel.”