When the United States Olympic wrestling team trials kicked off on Friday, April 19, Jamilah McBryde was supposed to be among those competing for a 2024 Summer Olympics spot.
But the young hijabi was forced to watch from home, all because of her uniform.
“To have an opportunity like this right now, where alhamdulillah I’m young, I’m healthy, I’m capable to go and compete and make the team and insha Allah do well — to have it taken when it was fairly earned, that’s hard,” she told The Athletic Ummah.
McBryde is one of just 81 women who qualified for the U.S. Olympic wrestling team trials, which were held at the Bryce Jordan Center in State College on April 19 and 20.
She secured what should’ve been a monumental qualification spot by winning the 2024 NAIA Women’s Wrestling Championship (143 lb. division) in March. She defeated Campbellsville University’s Emma Walker in that final.
But McBryde competes in a full hijab, complete with several layers of clothing to ensure she’s always fully covered. And according to United World Wrestling (UWW) — the international governing body for amateur wrestling — that look doesn’t comply with their uniform policy, which requires wrestlers wear a body-fitting singlet.
“They said you can wear spandex,” she said. “I’m like, that’s tight-fitting. It’s not modest. I can’t wear that.”
As a result, McBryde has been prohibited from participating in the trials. She and her family filed an “opportunity to participate” complaint with USA Wrestling, freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling’s governing body in the U.S. However, they received an email on Thursday saying the request was denied.
USA Wrestling told Atlanta News First’s Patrick Quinn that Jamilah can’t participate in the Olympic team trials because her uniform does not follow the UWW’s guidelines. USA Wrestling says that because the Olympics is an international competition, the decision to bar Jamilah from the trials is not theirs to make but the UWW’s, per Quinn’s reporting.
It’s a missed opportunity that McBryde is concerned she’ll never get again.
“Four years’ worth of work to be one of the 81 and [I] won’t get that opportunity again for the next four years,” she said.
“And, you know, we only have two years left of collegiate wrestling,” she added. “So once those two years are over, that could potentially be our last two years of being able to wrestle.”
Mustafa McBryde feels for his daughter. He used to wrestle himself, so he knows first-hand how much time and effort Jamilah dedicated to get to this stage. To see her barred from achieving an Olympic dream is hard for the parent to take.
“I opened my phone this morning and saw the world team trials … and I got so angry, I didn’t even read it,” he told The Athletic Ummah a few days ago.
“I know I’m going to see names on there who my daughters could wrestle with or have wrestled with and may have even beaten. And now, these people are given all the opportunities to do these sorts of things. That’s a little tough.”
A recurring headache
This isn’t the first time the McBrydes have been prohibited from wrestling events.
In 2014, Jamilah’s brother, Muhamed, missed a whole season because the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) wouldn’t let him wrestle with a beard.
At the time, NCAA rules said that wrestlers must be clean-shaven, but Muhamed said shaving his beard would compromise his faith.
He was eventually granted a waiver that allowed him to compete during the 2014-15 season, as long as he wore a face mask and chinstrap to cover it.
Eight years later, Jamilah’s younger sister, Latifah, was told she could only participate in the 2022 Pan-American Women’s Wrestling Championship if she abides by the UWW’s uniform rules.
According to the UWW’s uniform policy, male and female competitors must wear a singlet: a form-fitting, one-piece wrestling uniform. This uniform, which is used across all Olympic styles of wrestling, looks like a sleeveless shirt and compression shorts stitched together; the arms, most of the legs and parts of the upper body are exposed.
But as a hijabi, Latifah wasn’t comfortable wearing the singlet. She ended up forfeiting her spot in the tournament due to the uniform requirement.
“I thought, you know, they’ll come around. They’ll see what she’s done. They’ll see how well she wrestled,” Mustafa said. “I thought the proof is in the pudding, their abilities are evident.”
“No, it didn’t matter.”
Mustafa said Latifah took that moment like a champion, and she had the support of Jamilah and their other wrestler sister, Zaynah.
Still, the sisters — who all wrestle on Life University’s team — have continuously been refused entry into wrestling competitions, according to Jamilah. Recently, they weren’t allowed to compete in the trials for the U-17, U-20 and U-23 World Team Championships.
“It’s hard to know that as of right now, if my sisters were to make it [to the Olympic trials], they wouldn’t be able to go either,” Jamilah said.
The Athletic Ummah reached out to UWW’s President Nenad Lalović, Vice-President Stan Dziedzic and commissions chairman Arsen Julfalakyan for comment, but has not heard back from them.
Hope from Iran?
The McBryde sisters are not the only Muslimah wrestlers who’ve been forced to sit out of competitions due to their modest attire.
Also in the U.S., Umpqua Community College’s Zainab Ibrahim was told she’d be allowed to cover her hair during the 2023 Women’s National Championships, but only if she wore a singlet with no clothing underneath it. Ibrahim had to withdraw as a result.
Later in 2024, Jordan will host the first-ever Arab Women’s Wrestling Championship. However, due to the UWW’s uniform policy, hijab-wearing Muslimahs will not be able to participate — despite Islam being the majority religion in the Arab world.
There may be some hope through Iran, though. The hijab is mandatory in Iran, so to allow hijab-wearing women to compete professionally, Iran’s wrestling federation proposed a new women’s wrestling style with a modified uniform in 2017.
This style, called the “women classic style”, has the same rules as women’s freestyle wrestling, but it lets wrestlers wear a two-piece body suit consisting of long pants and a long-sleeved shirt.
The UWW approved the style and its uniform in 2017. According to the UWW’s website, the goal of this wrestling style and its unique uniform is to encourage more women to get involved in wrestling
This style was introduced “to respect the fundamental principle of Olympism: that the practice of sports is a human right and every individual must have the possibility to practice sports without discrimination of any kind,” the UWW’s website reads in part.
Although they compete in women’s freestyle wrestling, the McBrydes mould their uniforms after the classic style guidelines, using baseball pants and a hooded, long-sleeve shirt, among other pieces of clothing.
Jamilah says it’s clear in the classic style guidelines that the hijab-friendly uniform is not potentially advantageous or dangerous, as some claim it is.
“It’s clear in the document for classical uniforms that both wrestlers are still able to execute their holds, their attacks, their defences, their techniques,” she said. “It demonstrates that both wrestlers are still able to wrestle and still meet the rules and regulations of wrestling.”
According to a change.org petition for Jamilah, this uniform is in the approved list for both the NCAA and the NAIA College divisions, which is why Jamilah and her sisters can wear the hijab-friendly attire during collegiate play.
But on the international stage, the uniform can only be worn in women’s classic style wrestling, meaning it’s not a UWW-approved uniform for the Olympics.
The McBrydes have been trying to change that, though. Jamilah said they reached out to UWW and USA Wrestling in 2022 to find out how to get their uniform tested and approved for women’s freestyle events, but all they heard was that the organizations need to do more research.
To this day, they don’t know how the uniform testing is being conducted, nor if any of the McBryde sisters’ matches contribute to the test results.
“Collegiately, between me and my sisters, we’ve had over 205 collegiate matches in the past two years,” Jamilah said. “We still have not heard any word on if those matches count toward test events.”
The Athletic Ummah asked Lalović, Dziedzic and Julfalakyan about the guidelines wrestlers like Jamilah can follow to get their hijab-friendly uniform approved for UWW events, but did not receive a response.
“I think it’s been made clear that we can strike a balance between modesty and trying to please Allah (s.w.t) and wrestling, which is a sunnah.”
Jamilah McBryde, collegiate wrestler
Deen over wrestling
No matter how often she and her sisters are prohibited from participating in wrestling competitions, Jamilah McBryde says she’ll never compromise on her hijab.
“Before anything, I’m a Muslim,” she said. “I’m a Muslim before I’m a wrestler. I’m a Muslim before I’m a student, and I’m not going to sacrifice that for anything else.
“So if I had to give up the opportunity to wrestle for my hijab, that’s not even a question.”
Jamilah says there’s a history of strong, traditional women in Islam, such as Sayeda Khadijah (a.s) and Sayeda Nusaybah bint Ka’ab (r.a). These are the examples Jamilah wants to strive to be like, and she thinks she can do that by upholding the hijab while wrestling.
“I think it’s been made clear that we can strike a balance between modesty and trying to please Allah (s.w.t) and wrestling, which is a sunnah,” she said.
It means a lot for Mustafa to hear that from his daughter, in part because he and his daughters have received heat from some Muslims for their wrestling endeavours.
But he’s seen the doors Allah (s.w.t) has opened for his children in the wrestling space — they’ve gone from homeschooled kids to some of the most exciting fighters in their collegiate weight classes. He’s ever-grateful for how Allah (s.w.t) has taken care of them, through the good and bad times.
“To hear her say that and to hear my kids say that, it’s to know at this very point in time, if it all came to an end … she’d be in [Jannah], he said.
“Then, maybe she could petition Allah (s.w.t) … ‘I can’t be here without my father, let him in.’”
Until then, he hopes Jamilah and her siblings remain strong-willed because “to get that W, it’s going to require a fight.”
“Every day is a challenge,” he said. “I know this world … and I know that it’s tough. So I pray that Allah (s.w.t) will just protect them, preserve them, increase them and make us all people who don’t even get tested on Yawm al-Qiyamah.”
Headline image credit: Nick Pope/Life University