Saudi Arabia women athletes set to compete in London Games
Saudi Arabia has agreed to let one female athlete join their all-male delegation to the 2012 Olympics in a bid to block threats to bar them from the games if they didn’t let women participate. The move came after a warning last year by Anita DeFrantz , who heads the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Women and Sports Commission, that any country that didn’t allow female athletes to compete would be barred from the global competition. With 35 weeks to go before the games begin in London, the Saudi Arabian Olympic Committee has announced that woman can join the team, but with the caveat that they be living abroad . Saudi Arabia has never sent a woman to the Olympics and the kingdom forbids women from participating in sports in state-run schools . There is also no federation that organizes women’s sports. “[If] some of the female athletes who are living in Europe qualify to the Olympics through international federations or IOC, then we will step in to support them,” an o...