Proud

by Ibtihaj Muhammad

  This was a totally new experience for me; I felt kind of weird getting extra attention because people hadn’t seen a Muslim woman fence before. After getting over the initial shock of being considered “special” for wearing hijab, I thought it was kind of cool. I’d never thought of wearing hijab as anything extraordinary—it was just something I did. It was other people who defined it as exotic or dangerous. I was happy to be a source of inspiration to young Muslim girls in France, or anywhere else, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as a role model for kids except as a fencer. But that day was the first day I saw myself in a new light, with a new mission. If I could provide a vision of hope for these girls, hope that would help them craft their aspirations, manifest their dreams, and demonstrate that wearing hijab didn’t mean limited opportunities, then I was fully on board.

  When it came time to fence my first bout in the Palais, the faces of all of the young women who had asked for my autograph that morning flashed before me. As I placed my mask over my head, and forced myself to block out the noise of the audience on all four sides of the strip, I decided to fence for young Ibtihaj, and I fenced for the young Muslim girls I’d met that morning. I told myself that I would win for all of us. As I wielded my saber against one opponent after another, I felt the strength in my whole body respond to my demands. I smiled behind my mask as I locked out opponent after opponent. I felt invincible on the strip, and for a long time I was. I kept winning, fighting my way to chance at the final, before losing a close match to 2008 Olympic champion Olena Khomrova by a score of 14–15, and eventually finishing with a fourteenth place finish. I was ecstatic. It was my highest finish ever in a competition of that high quality. And my career was just getting started.

  During my first year on the national team, I was a workhorse who showed no mercy on the strip, but I was a lamb among my teammates, with the goal of forging friendships with them. I tried my best to fit in. Even though we all maintained our own individual training schedules, we would often be required to attend training camps together both in Oregon at Ed’s club and overseas, so I figured I’d have plenty of opportunities to bond with my new teammates.

  One time, at a training camp during the beginning of the season, Ed instructed us to free fence, and I was paired with an up-and-coming fencer named Melanie. She had hopes of making the team the following year.

  “Can we stop for a minute?” Melanie huffed, taking her mask off.

  I glanced at the clock on the wall and realized we’d been fencing for a while without any specific direction from our coach, and I noticed him in a huddle with Dagmara on the other side of the room. From where I stood, it looked like they were talking tactics.

  “Hold on, Melanie,” I said. “Let me go see what Ed wants us to do.”

  I jogged across the gymnasium, and as I got closer to the two of them, I stopped running and hovered at a respectable distance. I didn’t want to barge in on their conversation. I stood there for a minute waiting to be acknowledged and realized that Ed wasn’t speaking to Dagmara in English. I strained my ears and listened for any familiar-sounding words and when I could hear none, I assumed it was his native Polish. I stood there for a minute longer and finally cleared my throat, even though I figured he must have noticed me by then.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Melanie and I were wondering if you wanted us to rotate partners?”

  “Ibti,” the coach said, struggling to pronounce even my shortened nickname correctly, “please keep working on what I told you. I’ll let you know when it’s time to stop. You must keep working and not be so quick to give up. Don’t be lazy.”

  I pressed down on my lips, sealing my mouth shut. I didn’t want to say something I might regret. But me, lazy? Did this man not understand that all I knew was hard work? That in the dictionary under work ethic there is a picture of me? The insult—especially in front of my teammates—burned inside me. I clenched my teeth and turned to head back over to Melanie. As I walked away the coach said something in Polish, and he and Dagmara shared a laugh.

  Getting off to a rocky start with the team didn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t let it distract me from my purpose of becoming one of the world’s best fencers. And I didn’t let it deter me from continually trying to break the ice between my teammates and myself. It wasn’t easy to always be the one making the overtures of friendship, since I was, after all, the new member on the team. I felt a sense of “othering” was happening—because I was Black and a Muslim—but I wholly rejected the idea that it was my responsibility to make everyone else feel comfortable with me being different. I didn’t believe that was my burden to take on, yet at the same time I wanted to show them that if they gave me a chance they’d see we were more alike than different. I’d been in this position so many times before. I knew what I had to do.

  I put a lot of effort into being a great teammate. I tried to keep a smile on my face all the time. When we were on the road, I tried to initiate team dinners and arrange group outings when we landed in a new country or city for a competition. I held my tongue in times of dispute. I would compliment my teammates to show them I appreciated their skill and expertise on the strip. I barely recognized myself, as I tried to assimilate into the team. I went above and beyond to show them my best self. But my efforts to extend the olive branch of friendship were rarely if ever reciprocated. My dinner invitations were often turned down, as were my invitations for movie nights in our hotel rooms or sightseeing when we arrived in a new city.

  “Is there any plan to go out for a team dinner?” I asked the team manager once after practice. We were at a World Cup competition, and I had heard some talk of going out to a restaurant instead of eating at the hotel.

  “No, not this time, Ibtihaj,” the manager told me. “You should probably just order in and be ready for the competition tomorrow,” she said.

  I went back to my room. All of the travel for competitions was beginning to weigh on me. I was lonely and homesick. Akhi hadn’t been able to make it to this tournament, so I had no one to talk to and no one cheering in my corner. I consoled myself with the knowledge that with no dinner plans, I’d have more time to sleep and prepare for tomorrow’s competition

  The next morning when I boarded the bus to the venue, I sat next to Daria. I tried to make small talk as I knew we had a thirty-minute ride ahead of us.

  “What did you do for dinner last night?” I asked. “I ordered from the restaurant in the hotel and it was really good.”

  Daria turned to Mariel before answering. “Oh, we all went to this restaurant near the hotel.”

  “We tried to call your room but got no answer,” Dagmara jumped in.

  “That’s strange,” I said. “My phone never rang, and I don’t show any missed calls.”

  Dagmara shrugged. “I don’t know who made the call, but I know someone did. But anyway, you didn’t really miss anything. The food wasn’t that good.”

  I turned to our team manager, Cathy, who happened to also be Mariel’s mother. (Yes, our team manager was the parent of our star team member.) “You told me there was no team dinner,” I said.

  Never taking her eyes from the pages of her magazine, Cathy said with an annoyingly false note of concern, “Ibtihaj, it was nothing official. If it had been, I would have told you.”

  “Right,” I said doubtfully. Inside I was hurt. They clearly hadn’t invited me on purpose. I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes. I tried to sleep, willing the ride to be over as soon as possible.

  I spent the rest of my first year on the national team progressing as an athlete as I worked to climb the rankings, but socially, despite my best efforts, my attempts to bond with my teammates were consistently met with resistance deserving only of a pariah. I realized these women had known each other longer, but I couldn’t help but wonder if their behavior was intentional. They would routinely watch movies together in one of their hotel rooms but never invite me. When they made plans for dinner, I never got a call to tag along. And b
ecause we were only a team of four, being the one person left out when the other three gathered was all the more hurtful. Sometimes I would go to my room and call my mother and just cry from sheer frustration. I felt so foolish crying over the fact that my teammates were being mean to me, but it was just such a letdown to have finally “made it” and yet feel so alone at the top.

  My mother would try to console me, telling me, “Ibtihaj, when you have three sisters, you have all of the girlfriends you need. You don’t need your teammates to be your friends.”

  I knew my mom was right. I didn’t need them to be my friends, but spending so much time on the road, away from my family and friends, was hard enough without the pain of feeling like “the other” all the time. The feelings of dismissal and exclusion were overwhelming and suffocating for me.

  In general, it seemed my teammates and the coaching staff had a very superficial idea of who I was as a fencer and a person. They attributed my qualifying for the national team as a stroke of luck instead of the result of hard work and talent, and they attributed my wins on the team to brute strength and blind speed instead of intelligence and planning. Like so many other Black athletes, I was being pigeonholed as strong but not smart. The stereotyping and bias was incredibly exasperating, not to mention disheartening. The seemingly small events like leaving me off a team email chain or forgetting to include my name on the team list while on the road added up to a bigger problem. Despite my success on the strip, I was feeling increasingly unhappy. I wanted so badly to understand what I had done to make my teammates and the coaching staff treat me so coldly. I had never felt more lonely or disconnected in my life.

  Because I spent so much time alone during our competitions, I dedicated far too many hours to trying to dissect what was happening with my team. It was too easy to assume that their behavior toward me was based on some sort of racial or religious prejudice. But I wasn’t convinced that was it. I would lie in bed and wonder if it was because I was unapologetically competitive on the strip. Even if I had to fence against one of them in competition, I didn’t suspend my desire to win. Maybe they saw me as some sort of threat. Maybe I was breaking some sort of long-standing code that the newest member on the team wasn’t supposed to win and make her teammates look bad. But Mariel and Dagmara were seasoned competitors and had been on Team USA consistently. They didn’t need to fear me. Yet the more success that came my way, the harsher the treatment from my teammates and coaches became. After combing through all of the possibilities, my head would ache and I was back to where I started. In the end I decided that the women’s saber team simply wasn’t ready for change—an African-American Muslim was too much difference all at once. I think my team viewed me as so different from themselves they didn’t know how to relate, and they weren’t willing to put in the effort to figure it out. It was a sobering thought, but it was what I’d been given. And I recognized that I couldn’t force my teammates and coaches to push past their own limited thinking. That was something they would have to do on their own. I had to focus on fencing. Nothing else.

  CHAPTER 12

  We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.

  —MALALA YOUSAFZAI

  Once I realized that the women on my own team were not going to be my friends, I sought companionship elsewhere when I was on the road. Rather than hanging out in my hotel room waiting for an invitation that was never going to arrive, I started to spend time with fencers from other nations and would end up finding any number of people willing and eager to share a meal or go sightseeing. It was often a struggle, still feeling like an outsider on my own team, but I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to let my teammates’ behavior affect my goals. And my new goal was to make it to the 2012 Olympics in London.

  Because I was the newest member of the national team and because no one had ever even mentioned my name in the same breath as the Olympics, I didn’t talk about my Olympic dreams. I didn’t know the exact qualification path to make an Olympic team, but my plan was simple: work as hard as possible, maintain focus, and the success would come. I knew Mariel and Dagmara were favored to qualify, but I just kept telling myself, why not me too? When I fenced with Mariel and Dagmara they were formidable opponents, but they didn’t have anything I didn’t have. What I lacked in experience, I made up for with heart and determination. I told myself that the Olympics were a real possibility.

  But I had to fail first. And fail I did. It wasn’t a spectacular fail. To some it might have just seemed like an off day, but after a season of only podium finishes on the domestic circuit, a tournament where I failed to make it to the top sixteen crushed my spirit. The mental game plays such a pivotal role in fencing, and on that day, my mental game had been off. I had a hard time finding my way on the strip. For some reason my feet wouldn’t move fast enough, my arm felt heavy, and I was always one step behind where I wanted to be. For the first time in a long time, when my match was over, I cried. I cried not because I lost, but because my mind felt separate from my body, and I wasn’t able to get my head in the game.

  Back in my hotel room, I called my sister Faizah. She had graduated from high school and was now attending Rutgers University along with my other sister, Asiya. Faizah had now started competing on the national and international circuits as well and understood how devastating a loss could feel. She also understood the devastation of such a spectacular loss.

  “It was awful, Faizah,” I said, as I felt the tears forming again. “I haven’t lost like that in a long time,” I said.

  “What was the score?” Faizah asked.

  “Fifteen to seven,” I murmured.

  “That’s not so bad,” Faizah cooed into the phone. “And this was just one tournament. You’ve won so many more than you’ve lost.”

  “But this whole tournament I felt off, and it didn’t help that Ed yelled at me afterwards.”

  Faizah sighed. “Ignore him. He doesn’t care about you or how you do. If he doesn’t say anything positive to you when you win, then he doesn’t get to say anything to you when you have a bad day. Period.”

  My little sister was so wise. Not only did she know the intricacies of the sport and all of its rules, but she knew me and all of my idiosyncrasies as well. She knew I put on a fierce face during competition, but that my inner core was soft. My sister knew me better than anyone else. She was becoming my closest confidante and I depended on her more and more to help me ride through the ups and down of being a member of Team USA. She was the newbie on the circuit, but she was my ride-or-die all the way.

  The tournament was going to officially start in one hour. I was going through the motions of my warm-up, but all I was really doing was fighting the urge to go curl up in a corner somewhere and take a nap. The thing was, I had gotten plenty of rest on the flight over from the States and had a good night’s sleep the night before. I knew I wasn’t sleep deprived, yet the feeling of fatigue was overwhelming me and the desire to go to sleep was so strong. It took every fiber in my being not to give in to it and take a nap right there on the strip.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. I forced myself into a longer warm-up routine than normal, including some basic calisthenics and my usual stretching routine, but I couldn’t shake the fatigue I was feeling. In fact, I had this strange sensation like someone was pouring warm water over me, and I could feel it wash over my body starting from my temples all the way down to the tips of my toes, and I just felt so tired. Almost too tired to fence. I glanced up at the clock and realized I only had thirty more minutes before my first bout, and I was sitting on the ground feeling like a sloth. This was so unlike me, it felt strange. Somehow, I had to push through this feeling and get on the strip. This same thing had been happening to me for the last couple of competitions, and I knew once I started fencing, the fatigue would eventually fade as swiftly as it had come. But once the bout was over, another tidal wave of exhaustion would hit me. Since saber is all about speed and explosive energy, feeling s
low and lethargic before every competition was distressing. I didn’t know if the problem was physical or mental, so I wasn’t sure where to turn for help. And I worried about telling my coach and the other members of the team.

  Sometimes the universe conspires to help those in need. This was one of those occasions. While I was in the midst of having another abnormal attack of fatigue, the United States Olympic Committee assigned us an official team psychologist, Jamie Harshaw. It was one of the perks of being on the national team that I never knew about. Jamie met with each team member individually for a basic psychological evaluation and check-up. When it was my turn to meet with her, my issue of battling precompetition fatigue was at the top of my list. After breaking down exactly what I had been feeling, it was she who suggested that perhaps what I was experiencing was anxiety manifesting itself as fatigue. Where other people may hyperventilate or feel faint when having a panic attack, my anxiety essentially caused high levels of tiredness, leaving me feeling incredibly drained. Jamie’s assessment made total sense considering my experiences with this were recent and only happened at competitions. Perhaps the anxiety stemmed from a fear of failure or maybe even the perceived catastrophic consequences of not meeting my own expectations. To deepen the weight on my back was the disapproval of my teammates, who were less than forgiving when I lost a point or didn’t measure up to their expectations. I realized I had been suffering from performance anxiety in the moments before competing and had to learn how to manage these anxieties and disarm some of the triggers.