Maryam Toosi's Olympic Dream Faces USA Immigration Hurdle

The 31-year-old, who shot to fame by winning gold in the 400 meters at the 2012 Asian Indoor Championships while wearing a hijab headscarf, has been waiting in legal limbo for three years after applying for an American visa to train and compete.

Toosi wants to come to USA to take advantage of the superior facilities, better coaching and a culture that celebrates track and field because she knows Tokyo could be her last shot at competing at an Olympics.

And since getting engaged to Iranian-born USA citizen Moein Mohsen, she has been even more determined to make the move.

“Getting the visa would mean everything. Everything,” she told Reuters in a telephone interview from her current training camp in Cyprus.

Toosi’s career has been one long battle to prove that the people who say her dreams are impossible have got it wrong.

“When I first started chasing the dream of winning a gold medal or even qualifying for the Asian Games, everyone made fun of me — the federation, all the other athletes,” she explained.

“They asked, ‘how are you going to even qualify with the hijab, or the training you do?’ Even with the lack of training, I was still able to set those records and win that medal, and I’m here in Cyprus to prove I can do it at the Olympics too.”

The Iranian record holder at 100m, 200m and 400m, Toosi has suffered the agony of missing out on Olympic qualification twice before, in part due to technical errors made by race officials.

After those disappointments, she applied for a visa so she could train in USA, but despite having her interview in August 2016, she has still not received a decision.

That proclamation, the third in a series of travel bans implemented in 2017, seriously restricts citizens of several, mostly Muslim-majority nations to get USA visas.

The USA State Department did not respond to a request for comment on Toosi’s case.

Though she says her distinctive hijab is something of a hindrance on the track, she takes her position as a role model for Muslim women and girls very seriously.

“All the clothes that the other girls wear weigh about as much as my headscarf on its own. I have to wrap it tightly around me, but in another way, I don’t see it as a limitation. I am proud of my religion.

“When I first started competing, and all of a sudden a woman in a hijab was being seen next to Swedish girls or girls in regular track outfits, everybody was really shocked when they saw me,” she says.

“But after I started competing and breaking records, I started to see more and more females in hijabs,” Toosi said.