his family and friends, during the 1986 World Championship at Melbourne, Australia. After the competition, he hid at a friends’ house for 48 hours and turned himself in at a police station claiming amnesty. Several hours later, he was on his way to Turkey to begin his new life. Suleymanoglu was granted a waiver on the strict Olympic eligibility rules, after Turkey paid $1 million to Bulgaria in compensation (Agence France Presse, 2000). Naim went on to win Turkey’s first gold medal in 20 years at the 1988 Seoul Olympic games. He returned to Turkey as a hero. Shortly after returning to Turkey, his family followed and eventually 900,000 Turks were allowed to emigrate out of Bulgaria into Turkey, largely in part of the publicity and embarrassment created by the 4’11” Olympic giant towards the Bulgarian regime.Throughout the next few Olympic games and World Championships, Naim competed and won gold medals, except for the 2000 Olympic games, where he tried to win a fourth Olympic gold, but failed. According to Naim, “I feel despair due to the sorrow of the Turkish people because of my failure,” (Turkish Daily News 2000). The Turkish people did not consider him as a failure, but will be greatly remembered as the greatest weightlifter that ever lived, and most importantly, as the person who represented Turkish triumph over oppression.Cathy Freeman, an Aboriginal citizen of Australia, was another athlete that demonstrated her beliefs about the oppression of what her fellow Aborigines account for 2% of the country’s 19 million residents, and they are eerily invisible. They did not have any economic or political back up from the government; therefore most of them were unemployed, in poverty, in jail, and more prone to drug abuse. Their struggles in Australia were very much alike of the struggles experienced by African-American and Native Americans in the U.S. When European settlers came and conquered Aust...
