WARSAW: Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya told Reuters on Thursday she decided to defect as she was being driven to a Tokyo airport because her grandmother told her that it was not safe to return home to Belarus.
Here are some excerpts from her interview with Reuters in Warsaw. The quotes were translated into English from Russian by Reuters."They started to talk about my whole situation on Belarusian TV and they said I had some kind of psychological problems and my parents ... concluded I would either end up in a psychiatric hospital or in jail upon returning."
"My grandmother called me just as I was being driven to the airport. We were walking to the car. I had literally 10 seconds and she called me and said 'please don't return to Belarus, it's unsafe' and she hung up."I love my country so much. It's my motherland. I was born there. I never wanted to leave. I planned for one, two or even three more Olympics ... Everything that has happened is a bit of a shock for me and I didn't think this could all end for me.
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