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Saudi: Female athlete qualifies for 100-meter race at Tokyo Olympics

Saudi female runner Yasmeen Al-Dabbagh has qualified to participate in the Olympic Games, which is scheduled to begin later this month in the Japanese capital Tokyo.

Al Dabbagh has officially been announced as the first Saudi female athlete to qualify through a ‘Universality Place’ for the biggest global sporting event, weeks after she broke the national female 100-meter dash record at the athletics national trials on June 4, 2021, with a time of 13.24.

Yasmeen, who has been trained for the last three years by the UK running legend Linford Christie, has attended high school at the Jeddah Knowledge School in Saudi Arabia, where she found her passion in sports while participating in basketball, swimming, volleyball, gymnastics as well as track and field events.

However, when she went to study abroad at Columbia University, she decided to join Columbia Athletics to further develop her sporting career as a sprinter.

Al Dabbagh’s ambitions to represent her country began after she worked with the Saudi Arabian Athletics Federation in 2019. She aspired to join the national team and compete on a regional level.

She displayed her potential in a sport that has seen a huge demand among women in Saudi Arabia as hundreds of Saudi female athletes have formed social sporting groups in multiple disciplines of athletics.

She proved her complete readiness as she broke the female national record of the 100-meter race on June 4 this year, earning the federation’s nomination for the “Universality Place” for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

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Source
Saudi Gazette
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