1992 Olympics. Hassiba Boulmerka, gold medal against Islamism
Still 500 meters to make a dream come true. On August 8, 1992, on the athletics track of the Montjuïc Olympic stadium in Barcelona, a few strides still separated Hassiba Boulmerka from Olympic gold in the 1,500 meters. The 24-year-old Algerian, reigning world champion despite her puny appearance, nestled in the pack while the Russian Lyudmila Rogachova pulled ahead. It was a decoy. “I had decided that this would be my race, that I would be the queen. Technically, I knew exactly what to do,” she would say later.
With 300 meters to go, she attacked, scrutinized by the 90,000 spectators present, overtook Rogachova and won gold. While her opponents collapsed on the line, she launched into a lap of honor, Algerian flag on her shoulders, stirring the pride of a country that won the first Olympic gold medal in its history. In Algiers, Oran, Constantine, there were scenes of popular jubilation. “I first thought of Algeria, of all those moments of suffering (…) and then that all those sacrifices were worth it,” she told the newspaper Le Monde in 2021.
They are nothing compared to those who are waiting for her. Seeing a woman bring happiness to Algeria causes tension. The country has been in the Black Decade for several months. Following the tidal wave of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) – a supporter of an Islamic republic – in the first round of the legislative elections in December 1991, the Algerian government, under pressure from the army, interrupted the electoral process. A civil war pitted government forces against Islamist movements for ten years. Already threatened by the latter since her world consecration, Hassiba Boulmerka, a practicing Muslim, free and without a veil, became a symbol to be muzzled. Already in 1991, she had provoked the ire of fundamentalists by declaring that “you cannot enter a mosque with shorts, just as you cannot enter an athletics track with a hijab”.
Under close protection
The new Olympic champion therefore leaves the Barcelona stadium under escort and in an armoured car. In the wake of her title, the imam of the Ben Badis mosque in Kouba – the birthplace of the FIS – threatens her for having run “half-naked in front of the whole world”. “At 24, you’re not prepared for that”, she rewinds in Le Monde. From then on, her daily life is lived under close protection and her bodyguards accompany her to the stadiums. A civil servant in civilian life, she finds herself dismissed and her family threatened. Faced with danger and difficulties, she goes into exile, between Germany and Cuba, under protection until 2007. In the meantime, her compatriot Nouria Benida-Merah will have succeeded her on the highest Olympic step in 2000, in Sydney (Australia), also in the 1,500 metres. Another form of victory for her.