NY Times · Aug 3, 2021
The sprinter who sought refuge from Belarus is an unlikely dissident.
Video player loadingShe sparked the biggest political crisis of the Tokyo Olympics, but Kristina Timanovskaya didn’t set out to be a symbol of the repression in her native Belarus. She just wanted to run.
Timanovskaya, a 24-year-old sprinter whose specialty is the 200-meter dash, became the center of an international drama after her delegation forcibly tried to send her home from the Games. She had complained in an Instagram video that her coaches registered her for an event she hadn’t trained for, the 4x400-meter relay, because they had failed to conduct enough antidoping tests on other athletes.