Egyptian women’s beach volleyball team slams French hijab ban after Olympic match

(CNN) — Members of the Egyptian women’s beach volleyball team have spoken out against France’s hijab ban for its athletes after competing in an Olympic beach volleyball match wearing modest clothing.

Marwa Abdelhady and Doaa Elghobashy represented Egypt at the Paris Olympics, wearing hijabs, long black sleeved shirts and black ankle length leggings in a women’s beach volleyball match against Spain.

If they had been playing for France, the pair would not have been allowed to wear their hijabs. The host of this year’s Olympics has banned its athletes from wearing any “ostensible religious symbols” while competing.

Speaking to CNN’s Swedish affiliate Expressen Thursday, Abdelhady said that she “doesn’t like” the hijab ban for French athletes.

Elghobashy told Expressen that it should be okay for athletes to wear whatever they want, as long as their culture and religion are respected.

“I want to play in my hijab, she wants to play in a bikini,” Expressen reported Elghobashy as saying. “Everything is OK, if you want to be naked or wear a hijab. Just respect all different cultures and religions.”

“I don’t tell you to wear a hijab and you don’t tell me to wear a bikini. No one can tell me how to dress. It’s a free country, everyone should be allowed to do what they want,” she said.

In January 2022, the French senate voted to ban the wearing of the hijab and other “ostensible religious symbols” in sports competitions.

In September last year, it was confirmed that this ban would also apply to French athletes competing in the Paris Olympics, when French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra said that the country would favor “a strict regime of secularism, applied rigorously in the field of sport.”

Elghobashy was the first athlete to play beach volleyball in a hijab at the Olympics, debuting in 2016 in Rio De Janeiro after the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) gave her last-minute permission to wear the head covering while playing.

In an interview with CNN Sport last year, the athlete said that “the hijab is part of me.”

This is not the first time that female athletes have spoken out about their uniforms being policed.

In 2021, Double Paralympic world champion Olivia Breen said that she was “speechless” when an official at the English Championships told her that her sprint briefs were “too short and inappropriate.”

The same year, Norway’s women’s beach handball team was fined for “improper clothing” after players opted to wear shorts instead of bikini briefs during a European championship game in Bulgaria.

Elghobashy said attention should be on her performance, not her outfit. “At the end of the day, it’s a sport and I’m not a model. I’m an athlete and people should focus more on my athleticism rather than my clothes,” she told CNN.

“Just because I’m a hijabi doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t have the opportunity to play at the Olympics,” she added. “I did this, I achieved it. I deserved it.”

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Henrik Pettersson contributed to this report. Previous reporting by CNN’s Amy Woodyatt, Chris Liakos, Maya Szaniecki, Shara Talia Taylor and Eryn Mathewson.