Mahboubeh Barbari Zharfi’s Paris 2024 journey: ‘Even if you are a single mother and a refugee, you can achieve your goal’
As a single mother competing for the IOC Refugee Olympic Team in judo at Paris 2024, Mahboubeh Barbari Zharfi’s story is one of resilience and determination.
“I want to give it my all,” she tells Olympics.com.
“I want to prove one thing: even if you are a single mother and a refugee, you can achieve your goal and your biggest dream. For my daughter, I want to be a person to look up to.”
After leaving the Islamic Republic of Iran, Barbari Zharfi sought asylum in Germany along with her daughter in 2018, where her former husband was already living.
“It was very difficult,” Barbari Zharfi she says, when asked about adapting to life in Germany.
“Everything was totally different compared to my life in Iran: the culture, the weather. But I have one big strength: I like to interact with people. That helped me a lot and now everything is fine.”
Mahboubeh Barbari Zharfi out to inspire her daughter
Evidently a social butterfly, Barbari Zharfi jokes “I even have too many friends,” adding: “Not only in Germany. There is friendship to athletes from all over the world. Serbia and Thailand for example.”
Making friends across the international judo community has certainly helped Barbari Zharfi, who became an IOC Refugee Athlete Scholarship Holder in December 2023.
In May, she was then confirmed in the IOC Refugee Olympic Team’s roster for Paris 2024, where she could yet compete against her idol and Tokyo 2020 gold and bronze medallist Romane Dicko in the +78kg category.
“Judo is a very special sport,” she says. “You need flexibility and physical strength as well. I like Romane Dicko from France, the number one in the world ranking in my weight class. She’s my role model. I really like how she is doing Judo, how she fights. It’s amazing.”
Having been encouraged to take up the sport as a teenager by her mother, now it is her own daughter she wants to inspire, having faced difficulties being a single mother.
“Ahead of every training session or a competition, I have to organise everything for my nine-year-old daughter and entrust her to someone who will take care of her,” she adds.
“It's not always easy, but I am able to manage that.”
It’s all part of the process for Barbari Zharfi, who can recall the moment her Olympic dream started to take shape.
“I remember it well,” she says. “I think I was 17 years old. A newspaper journalist from my hometown asked me after a victory in a competition: ‘You took first place today. What are your goals for the future?’
“Then I answered: ‘I would like to compete at the Olympic Games.’ The journalist said: ‘Okay, that's your dream.‘ This dream was so big. And now, thank God, I've achieved it. I'm totally happy and excited.”
Barbari Zharfi boasts a third dan black belt in judo, and while she has also taken on roles as a judge and coach in the sport, she is also keen on bodybuilding, swimming, and running.
Come Paris 2024, she is eager to watch the boxing and wrestling when she gets the chance, but her heart is very much in the “special” sport in which she competes.