A reported recording has emerged on the news outlet Meduza of an angry meeting at the Tokyo Olympic Village on Monday in which Belarus team chiefs tried to persuade sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya to return home after criticizing her coaches on Instagram.

Just a few hours afterward, the sprinter fled into the arms of police at Tokyo’s Narita airport as Belarus officials tried to force her onto a flight to Minsk. On Wednesday, after two days holed up at the Polish embassy in Tokyo, she was back at Narita to take a flight to a life of exile in Europe.

According to a partial recording of the conversation Tsimanouskaya said she made herself—a translation of which has been published by the investigative outlet Meduza—there follows an angry exchange in which the runner herself alternates between tears and angry defiance.

According to the transcript, the two men first try to reassure her that if she comes home without a fuss all will be fine, that it will be forgotten as a youthful indiscretion and she will be able to resume her athletics career. But that is clearly a lie—the Lukashenko regime doesn’t forgive and forget—as all three would have known. “I think this won’t end well for me,” says Tsimanouskaya.

Clearly terrified for their own futures if they fail to get her home, the team officials warn her that if she does not back down then everyone will suffer, the entire team could be ruined. “Through your stupidity, you could end up destroying people’s lives,” Shumak tells her.

Rebuffed again, they appeal to her to follow the tenets of the Orthodox faith and show Christian humility—or risk a far worse fate. “Humility makes a person,” Moisevich says on the reported recording. “Get over this. Put aside your pride. Your pride will tell you, ‘Don’t do it. You’ve got to be kidding’ and it will start pulling you into the devil’s vortex and twisting you. That’s how suicide cases end up, unfortunately.”

“The devil grabs them and says ‘You have to prove it to somebody, so jump from a balcony. Oh, how they’ll tear out their hair and later lament that they drove you to it.’ And you know what’s the funniest thing? The people will say, ‘Well, that idiot could have lived. She didn’t prove anything to anyone,’” he continued, according to the Meduza translation of the reported recording.

With Tsimanouskaya digging in, Moisevich tries another tack: He invokes the example of the Russian general Kutuzov and his decision to abandon Moscow to the mercy of Napoleon’s forces after the battle of Borodino in 1812. The French burnt the city down and looted everything they could take, only for Kutuzov to defeat them as they were returning to France.

“So when there’s a situation like this, it’s like in judo—you use your opponent’s own strength,” he adds, jumping back to a sporting analogy. “He rushes at you, you step back, and he’s knocked down by his own force.”

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/belarus-sprinter-flies-life-exile-131430152.html?.tsrc=fp_deeplink