The conflict facing sporting defectors: ‘How do you find home in a new place?’

When Paul Szabo saw the story of the Iranian women’s footballers who defected to Australia this week, it stirred familiar memories.

Their tales played out in different times and under different conditions, but they are strikingly similar. Both were part of sports teams representing repressive regimes. Both were away with those teams in ‘freer’ nations. Both saw an opportunity for a different life. Both pulled off a dramatic escape with the help of friendly natives. Both, ultimately, defected.

The Iranians, in Australia to play in the Asian Cup, were helped by police in Brisbane to flee their hotel and were granted asylum. Szabo, a fencer from Romania, was competing at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, and was assisted by a friend who drove him away from the athletes’ village and to freedom.“I immediately connected to what they must be going through,” Szabo tells The Athletic. “It’s so complex. I really felt for them. I admire their courage.”

It’s hardly a surprise that sportspeople often defect, or are considered strong candidates to do so: in oppressive regimes, they are the ‘normal’ people who are most likely to see the outside world, to have a taste of a different life.

“I travelled a lot,” says Szabo. “I had seen lots of countries, met lots of people. I spoke French, I could get along with people and talk a little bit about their lives. At the time, (Romanians) were allowed one trip every two years to a communist country, as a holiday. Compared to that, I had seen the world — Paris, Rome, all of these places. If I retired (from fencing), I’d never be able to see those places again.”

Athletes have more immediate opportunity to abscond than most: while teams from authoritarian regimes will generally have state minders of some description with them, it’s much easier to slip undetected from a hotel in Brisbane, than to escape from Tehran.

Their governments know it, too. The Eritrean football team was not allowed to take part in qualifiers for the Africa Cup of Nations from 2008 until this year, primarily because the country’s rulers thought that players would defect while playing abroad. And not without reason: on five occasions since 2009, Eritrean players have attempted to seek asylum in other countries while away with national teams.

Probably the most famous sporting defector is Martina Navratilova, who aged 18, shortly after the 1975 US Open, walked into a New York immigration office and told them she wanted to switch allegiances from Czechoslovakia, at the time under communist rule, to the USA.

Her motivation was less ideological and more rooted in what was best for her sporting career.

“I felt if I didn’t get out, I could not become the best player in the world,” she told media at the time. “I had to ask if I could play this tournament and that tournament. It was very frustrating. Politics had nothing to do with my decision. It was strictly a tennis matter.”

For others, the politics were a factor.

“What I started slowly to experience is that my athletic performance started to become political,” says Szabo. “The motivation, or the enjoyment for performing at that level, was hijacked by expectations of representing the country. And that’s not me.”

And it wasn’t just ‘success equals glory’ — the reverse was true, too. After one particularly disappointing performance, Szabo “had a meeting with a communist party member, and I got a scolding, was told that I didn’t love our country and was not a good communist. That so incensed me — it was like, ‘Why are you taking this away from me?’ The motivation was that I wanted to do well. I couldn’t live with that.”

That chimes with a potential inspiration for the Iranian footballers: Kimia Alizadeh, a taekwondo player who had become the first woman from Iran to win an Olympic medal at the 2016 Games. She left the nation of her birth in 2020, eventually representing Bulgaria in 2024, where she won another bronze medal.

“I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran whom they’ve been playing for years,” she posted on Instagram at the time. “I wore whatever they told me and repeated whatever they ordered. Every sentence they ordered, I repeated. None of us matter for them, we are just tools.”

Some regimes were and are particularly brutal towards defectors, not least Hungary in the 1940s. Footballer Sandor Szucs was banned from playing for the national team after embarking on an extramarital affair with a singer, Erzsi Kovacs, and told that his whole career was in danger if he didn’t end the relationship. He didn’t, and the couple attempted to escape to the west in 1951, initially to Austria. But the man who they thought was helping them cross the border turned out to be an agent of the AVH, the Hungarian secret police.

Kovacs was imprisoned for four years, but because Szucs played for the police-controlled club, Ujpest, technically rendering him part of the armed services, he was subject to more punitive anti-defection laws. He was tried, found guilty and executed, his fate at least in part designed to be a warning to others plotting a similar escape.

It worked for a while, but after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, many players — including Ferenc Puskas, Hungary’s greatest ever footballer — never returned to Hungary. There was also a wave of defections by athletes after the Melbourne Olympics that year.

The Olympics are fertile ground for defections. Szabo’s own flight was almost scuppered by a security crackdown after a few other Romanians gave their handlers the slip. At London 2012, boxers and swimmers from Cameroon and Guinea disappeared and ultimately claimed asylum in the UK.

There were multiple defections at the 1996 Atlanta Games, including two flag bearers at the opening ceremony. Jawid Aman Mukhamad, a boxer who carried the flag for Afghanistan, was accused of being a communist by his country’s officials on the basis he had trained in Russia. He disappeared along with his coach Ahmad Samim, and surfaced in Buffalo, New York, eventually being granted asylum in Canada.

The other was Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmed, who had witnessed Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic son Uday executing athletes for poor performances. He fled while his minders were preparing for a trip to Atlanta zoo, although he did so with a heavy conscience.

“My thoughts were with my family the entire time,” he told the BBC at the time. “I was worried about them and what would happen to them after the Iraqi officials found out I was escaping.”

“I did worry about (my family),” says Szabo. “I knew the Securitate — the secret police — would interrogate them. They kept interviewing my mother, blaming her for setting me up to do this. Finally, she said: ‘Look, I trusted you to take care of him — this is your fault!’ When they heard that, they never went back to her.

“I wasn’t able to call my family for a year. When I would call my city, they would say no such city exists in Romania!”

The U.S. has, inevitably, often been the target for defectors.

There has been a steady stream of athletes fleeing Cuba, including baseball All-Stars like Yoenis Cespedes, Jose Fernandez, Aroldis Chapman, and Randy Arozarena. Maybe the most dramatic involved half-brothers Livan and Orlando ‘El Duque’ Hernandez, a story that eventually became an ESPN ’30 For 30’ documentary. Livan defected in 1995, eventually signing for the Miami Marlins via Mexico and a stint playing in the Dominican Republic. This led to Orlando being banned from representing Cuba at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, along with another player Victor Mesa, for fear they would try the same thing.

On Christmas Day 1997, Orlando boarded a boat with other potential defectors, including catcher Alberto Hernandez (no relation), and set sail for a spot just off the Florida coast where another boat was due to take them into the U.S.. However, the boat never arrived, and the party floated there for three days before the U.S. Coast Guard picked them up. Orlando was eventually granted permission to stay, signing for the New York Yankees.

Plenty of boxers have made the same journey, notably Joel Casamayor, who won gold at the 1992 Olympics. His reward for that success was a bicycle, which given he knew even Soviet athletes were given cars or apartments for winning medals, jarred to say the least. He sold the bike to buy a pig for his family.

In the lead up to the 1996 games, he was training in Mexico but looked unlikely to make the weight the authorities expected him to fight at, so fearing being sent home to “clean backyards”, he snuck out of the training camp in the dead of night, and along with Ramon Garbey, another Cuban boxer, eventually made their way to the U.S. border at El Centro, California. There, with the help of legendary boxing promoter Bob Arum, he got into the U.S. and went on to win world titles at super featherweight and lightweight.

He even managed to get most of his family out of Cuba and to the US, but there was one thing he didn’t get back. “I had a trophy case, with 200 trophies on the wall,” Casamayor told the LA Times in 2008. “They came into my home after I was gone and took one thing out. The gold medal. It is in a museum now.”

Other stories are a little more prosaic, and even funny, as in the case of footballer Miodrag Belodedici, who had been part of Romania’s Steaua Bucharest team that beat Barcelona in the 1986 European Cup final. He fled the country in 1988, travelling to neighbouring Yugoslavia, where he knocked on the door at Red Star Belgrade’s stadium and offered his services. He had to tell a bemused club official six times who he was before being believed.

After the flight, comes the reality of starting afresh in an alien country, something the Iranian footballers will be contemplating now.

Szabo was helped by Geza Tatrallyay, the Hungarian-born fencer who drove him away from the Olympic village and who had lived in, and competed for, Canada since he was a boy. Szabo was also from a Hungarian background, so initially rested on the local Hungarian community, but he had to assimilate sooner or later, something made trickier by his lack of English.

“I spoke French, so I thought if I stayed in Montreal I would be able to communicate with people,” he says. “But my French was more Parisian French, so I couldn’t understand a word of Quebec French! I would feel like I was brain-damaged: I would understand the context and the situation, but I couldn’t say anything.

He did a variety of menial jobs (“I got a job on a tobacco farm, got $1,000 and thought ‘I’m a capitalist now’ — I’d never seen that much money in one place”), joined a fencing club, and eventually went to university, qualifying as a psychologist.

But as well as dealing with practical issues, there were deeper questions — around belonging and dislocation.

“I didn’t have a base to go back to,” he says. “I didn’t have a ‘home’. It’s a significant question: how do you find a ‘home’ in a new place?

“I started to feel a bit more at home after about six years. I would start to speak Hungarian less and less. I started to make more connections. I became much more part of the rhythm of life in Canada. It takes time.”

Time is what the Iranian footballers must now consider. They are in a new country, in theory safer, but life now stretches in front of them. It is a time of hope, but also uncertainty.

Szabo says goodbye. He wasn’t expecting to talk about this, and he seems to have enjoyed looking back on his decision, half a century ago. With one caveat.

“As long as you’re not from the Securitate,” he says, with a laugh. “The fear is always there!”

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