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Sport
5 min read

What’s Simone Biles doing today?

How to live with winning and losing.

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate. 

A gold medallist bites her medal.
Simone's gold medal moment.
@simonebiles

I wonder about what Simone Biles is doing today. She is one of the many athletes whose Paris 2024 was about more than gold; it was about redemption. Now the Games are over, what happens to their restoration story?  

The narrative about redemption seemed to dominate the headlines and linger in post-event interviews. Some Olympians came to the Games seeking it. Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan was tipped for gold in Tokyo 2020 but stumbled on the pommel horse, finishing in seventh place. In France, he climbed to the top of the podium.  

Others completed a fall and rise within the two weeks themselves. Sprinter Jeremiah Azu had a faltering beginning to the Games, disqualified for a false start in the individual 100m heat. Just six days later he was clutching a bronze medal for the relay.  

Then there are those like taekwondo athlete, Jade Jones, who also laboured for years and gave their all – but didn’t get the payoff that they sought. What does the story mean when it is unfulfilled? And when the Games are over, how do people live with winning and losing?  

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up. 

After years of professional procrastination, a few months ago I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn. An impressive feat, I know. It was driven by practicality; I was finishing a job as a climate policy advocate and making the leap into consultancy. But I’ve been fascinated to discover how people in my community, and millions of others, are sharing tender and vulnerable ideas and thoughts in this social workspace. They are coming with questions – what does success look like? How are you navigating your purpose in the day to day? What world do you want your children to inherit? – and gentle ideas about their answers.  

People are asking about and reflecting on how to navigate winning, and losing, and living in the murky space in between.  

This feels striking because one of the other prevalent stories many of us believe, maybe unconsciously, is that life will generally be good and any setbacks are the exception. Growing up in the Nineties the message seemed to be: the world is your oyster if you work for it. Put in the effort, and the losses will be few and the trajectory will be up.  

But the last few years in particular – economic volatility, growing exposure of deep inequalities, the worsening climate crisis – hammer home that this is not reliably the case. No matter how much effort you put in, we rarely live through one type of season at a time. Joy and suffering co-exist. And amongst the highs and the lows, there is a whole lot of everyday living. Show up at the desk, the school gate, the supermarket.   

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.  

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. 

But part of the problem with many of the redemption tales we share is that they rely on the person themselves to deliver their own restoration. They’ve had (and are perhaps blamed for) a fall from grace, and now it’s up to them to find it within themselves – their physical, mental and emotional capacity – to achieve restoration. That’s a heavy weight to put on anyone’s shoulders (however broad they may be).  

And any redemption gained is fleeting. Medal winners talk about ‘gold medal syndrome’: the post-competition feeling of depression, loneliness and emptiness. For those athletes who’ve now headed home after fulfilling a salvation arc, is the emotional dip going to be even steeper, harder?  

Most of us won’t be Olympians, despite how expertly we discuss the diving scores every four years, but that sense of deflation after achieving a long-sought goal can be resonant. We’ve strived and risked ourselves for something, only to find the aftertaste is a bit flat. That new job is good but flawed. Winning that award doesn’t stop a rejection landing in the inbox the next day. The house renovations are already showing cracks. Winning and losing are both transient. A redemption made ourselves rarely satisfies or lasts. 

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. One that goes further than a single person or moment – a birth, a podium, a bonus. Such a story can speak beyond our own lives to the core challenges we face in the world: fairness into a broken economic system; peace instead of violence in our communities; flourishing, not escalating environmental crises.   

During my years of climate advocacy, I have sometimes envied colleagues working on more tightly defined topics with the possibility (only fulfilled through huge amounts of wisdom and graft, of course) of winning. Change a law, solve a problem. As the climate gets warmer and more unpredictable, it’s easy to have a sense that, at best, you are just making things a little less bad. The wins are in the context of a lot of disappointments, and a whole lot more grey space in between. 

But by being able to root my day to day in a bigger story, I can move forward with hope. Understanding our lives as part of an even greater narrative – the story of this world that God loves and sustains and restores – saves us from the pressure and heartache of trying to redeem our own lives. Instead, we can live them – the wins, the losses, and all the mundane moments in between – in light of that bigger story.  

Looking at the world through the lens of God’s redemption story helps us to stay clear-sighted: celebrating the successes and not make them our whole world; naming the problems and still acting with hope and grit. 

A redemption arc is a beautiful one. I want to hold onto that longing, but find it in a story that’s deeper, longer and richer than I can see. A story that lasts.  

Article
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Freedom of Belief
6 min read

Experiencing Tbilisi's cold shoulder

Georgia’s warm welcome doesn't extend to refugees fleeing Iran.

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

On a rainy night a pedestrian, holding a brolly, waits to cross a road.
Tbliisi, Georgia.
Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash.

On the surface, Georgia has a lot going for it: natural beauty, historic sites, lovely food and wine. 

It also boasts an extremely free market. Anyone can to set up a business of their choosing within a couple of hours, should they have the wherewithal. 

But therein also lies the rub. Life is not so easy for those without such wherewithal - perhaps they don’t have sufficient capital, or vision; a disability prevents them; or they try but fail. 

And then life is not so easy in Tbilisi. 

My focus on my recent trip to Georgia, as an employee of an Iranian Christian charity, was its small Iranian population - and principally those who have claimed asylum there. 

I spoke to several such individuals during my stay, and the conclusion that I reached was that Georgia is a lovely place to live, provided that you: a) have money; and b) are happy not to speak out about sensitive issues.  

Which, honestly, sounds eerily like the country from which my Iranian friends fled in the first place. 

When he ignored the warnings, the threats escalated. His car was broken into, and someone even came to his church, claiming to have a bomb strapped to himself. 

Take Reza, for example, who left Iran eight years ago and came to Georgia in the hope that in a country where nearly 90 per cent are Orthodox Christians, he would be free to practise his chosen faith. 

He even set up a church there, and for a while all was good. Until he started getting involved in protests against the regime back in Tehran.  

Reza joined demonstrations outside the Iranian embassy in Tbilisi - which is in a lovely area of town, right next to the Russian embassy and also, somewhat awkwardly, that of Ukraine. 

He also protested outside the “Ferdowsi Educational Complex” - a Shia school with a sign outside proclaiming it as an entity of the Iranian embassy. 

And for these protests, Reza received some, at first, gentle reprimands. He was called by a private number, encouraging him not to take such action again in the future. 

When he ignored the warnings, the threats escalated. His car was broken into, and someone even came to his church, claiming to have a bomb strapped to himself. 

It was only at this point that Reza decided, against his initial intentions, to claim asylum. 

But though the Georgian immigration service eventually acknowledged him to be a Christian - unlike many of his fellow Iranian asylum-seekers - they did not accept that this fact would put him at risk of persecution were he to return home. 

To which the only rational response is a wide-open mouth and outstretched arms. 

Have the Georgian immigration service not read the news? Do they not know that Christians - and more specifically, evangelical Christians and converts like Reza - face sustained and systematic persecution? 

The answer to this question, I was to discover, is two-pronged. 

Firstly, there is Georgia’s close relationship with the Islamic Republic, the reason for which, sadly and all too predictably, is of course money. 

“Georgia is a small country,” a lawyer who deals with immigration cases like Reza’s told me. 

“It’s surrounded by three big countries: Russia, Turkey and Iran, and can’t afford to have bad relations with all of them.” 

Both Russia and Turkey have history of seeking to occupy Georgia, while Russia has made no secret of its hope of re-establishing the territories it once held, including, one presumes, Georgia. 

In this context, it is little wonder that little Georgia does not feel able to cast aside so lightly its relationship with its third mega-neighbour, Iran. 

And when an Iranian claims asylum in Georgia - on whatever grounds - what message would it send for the Georgian government to recognise that claim? 

In the case of Christians like Reza, the message would clearly be that Iran persecutes Christians, which is an uncomfortable reality for a close ally of Iran to publicly admit. 

You can search his name on Google, in both English and Persian, and it’s safe to say that what you would find would not please the Islamic Republic. 

The second prong at play, meanwhile, which is equally uncomfortable to speak about, is the reality that in general Georgia’s Orthodox Christians tend to share some of Iran’s ill-feeling towards evangelicals. 

“They think of us the same way as Jehovah’s Witnesses,” Reza explained. 

“A Georgian friend of mine accused me three times of being a spy for America,” another convert told me. 

Another, whose case was rejected because Georgia’s immigration service did not accept he was a Christian, told me the questions he was asked in his interview related only to elements of the Orthodox faith, about which he had no idea. 

And when this individual sought to explain his own reasoning for his deeply held faith - for which he was arrested in Iran - they told him he could only answer the questions posed. 

And so he said that he could not. And so they rejected his claim, declaring that it had not been established that he was a Christian.  

An easy win.  

I could focus now on the particular challenges faced by asylum-seekers who are unfit to work - two of whom I met, and who receive no support from the state - but I would like to close with one final example which I think highlights the absurdity of the situation. 

And that is the example of Behzad Asiaie, an Iranian whose claim for asylum was based on his political activity and not his faith, although he has since converted to Christianity - for which he blames Reza, as, no doubt, would the Iranian and dare I say even Georgian government. 

The striking thing about Behzad’s case is that it’s extremely well documented. You can search his name on Google, in both English and Persian, and it’s safe to say that what you would find would not please the Islamic Republic. 

For one thing, Behzad has already spent a year in Tehran’s Evin Prison for his activism. Added to that, since arriving in Georgia five years ago, with no intention to claim asylum, he started a new activist group called Hamrasho (which means “all together”), which has organised protests about various things outside the edifices of the Islamic Republic in Tbilisi. 

As part of the protests, which is where Behzad met Reza, Behzad even filmed himself burning images of Iran’s Supreme Leader, and published it on social media. 

So, when the Georgian government rejected his eventual asylum case and told him that they didn’t think he would have any problem were he to return to Iran, the jaw really must drop open. 

My conclusion upon leaving Georgia was that it really is a lovely country -  provided that you have money and don’t make too much noise. 

I put this perspective to a Russian couple, who I met on my last night in town, and they - like Reza and Behzad before them - nodded in agreement. 

For they, like my Iranian friends, are exiles, having fled Russia because they are against Putin’s war. 

They told me they know of no other Russians among the thousands in Tbilisi who support Putin’s war, but nor do they know any who would be foolish enough to protest about it - whether back home, or outside the Russian embassy in the lovely Vake district of Tbilisi. 

I penned this article on my last night in Georgia in a Ukrainian restaurant housed roughly between the two edifices of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which felt about right. 

The entire restaurant is painted in the colours of the Ukrainian flag; the Wifi name is “Slava Ukraine”; and the password, I was told, translates as “super slava”. 

Which seems to be about the loudest protest that one can get away with in Tbilisi.