A Girl Named Genghis Khan: Squash Player Masqueraded as a Boy to Learn the Game

themarysue:

When Maria Toorpakai Wazir was four, she cut her hair, dressed in her brother’s clothes, and took her own clothes into the backyard to burn them. “My father started laughing,” she says, “and said, ‘Here we go, we have a Genghis Khan in the family.’” The rest of her childhood in the Waziristan region of Pakistan was marked by fist fights, which she says is how she made friends. “I am a warrior, I was born a warrior, I will die like a warrior.” Sounds about right for a girl who dressed as a boy in order to play the sport of squash, becoming the best female player in Pakistan, until Taliban threats forced her to leave the country in order to continue to train.

The difference between what they asked Vika and what they asked everyone else.

Look, it’s a tough call. She had injuries, no doubt, but she also called it at a critical time in the match. She was also the better player, clearly, in spite of her trouble closing out the match. It seems suspicious, especially given her comments immediately post-match about needing to clear her head to avoid “the biggest choke ever,” but this article makes some fair points that are necessary to remember in all the brouhaha. Overall though, I think the take-away here is a need to review the rules about injury time-outs and how they are used in tennis matches, majors or otherwise. They’re not like NFL time-outs, which can be pulled strategically whenever. Should tennis continue to allow injury time-outs for players, let alone simultaneous ones? How many other sports do you know that allow a player a 7 minute break to recover (a sport that doesn’t allow subs)? I’m not sure that Stephens would have come back to beat Azarenka, but that’s what’s so great about tennis - it can turn at any time. It’s also a hugely psychological game, which is why winning that game could have been huge for Stephens - or it may not have, we’ll never know. 

“Azarenka did nothing illegal. She asked for treatment from the medical staff and she got it.

But it was hardly an act in the spirit of sport.

Tennis must review its rules so that such contempt for sportsmanship cannot be exercised.”

All this aside, I’m rooting for Li Na.

-hq