Alizadeh made history when she competed in taekwondo at the Rio Olympics in 2016. Aged only 18, she beat Sweden's Nikita Glasnovic 5-1 in the bout for the bronze in the -57kg category. It made her the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal. But in the wake of that success, she felt the country's authorities were using her success as a propaganda tool. Now 21, she disappeared last week, with rumours circulating she was seeking to settle in the Netherlands. Though she has not confirmed where she is, she has announced in an Instagram post that she left Iran because she did not want to be part of "hypocrisy, lies, injustice and flattery". "I wore whatever they told me and repeated whatever they ordered. Every sentence they ordered I repeated. None of us matter for them, we are just tools," she wrote. She has described herself as "one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran".
