At the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, Nepal won three medals—all bronze and all in taekwondo. Of the three medallists, one was Ayasha Shakya, who was competing on the cusp of adulthood. It marked a beginning for one of Nepal’s most decorated women athletes.

However, after she grabbed a silver medal, narrowly missing a chance at gold, at the 12th South Asian Games in India in 2016, she thought she was done with the sport.

Shakya, who won her first SAG gold at the 10th edition in Dhaka, Bangladesh, had tied the knot in 2011 with Deepak Bista, one of Nepal’s legends of the game. Bista was another bronze medal winner alongside Shakya at the 2006 Asian Games and was only the second Nepali to reach the Olympics through qualification.

By 2016, the couple had two sons, and Shakya wanted to spend her time taking care of the young ones.

“I was concerned that I needed to take care of my kids, I needed to take care of my family,” Shakya told the Post. “So I stopped thinking about taekwondo.”

Shakya feels lucky that her husband, Bista, has supported her career in taekwondo. But still, after marrying and having children, she felt pressure to give up her sports for family from people who questioned her decision to continue her athletic career.

“In Nepal, everything depends on mothers,” she said. “How their child behaves, how their child is educated, everything depends on the mother.”

Yet, when her first son was 10 months old, she was in training for the 12th SAG despite feeling conflicted about spending time away from her son to compete internationally.

“It was hard for me at that time,” she recalls. “I also thought, ‘Why am I doing sports? I have a kid now, I need to take care of him.’”

Despite these doubts, Shakya knew she had to continue her career in athletics because giving up sports would be a waste of her potential.

“I thought, ‘If not now, when?’ I would have regretted it had I not continued the sport, which was then my passion,” she said.

Shakya was not satisfied with leaving her sports career behind after the 12th SAG. Thus, when an opportunity to compete once again with the Nepali Army’s taekwondo team knocked on her door, she accepted it and returned to the arena. The decision was followed by a rigorous training regimen, and she won gold when SAG returned to Nepal in 2019 for the 13th edition. This time, she celebrated the achievement with her husband and two sons.

Nepali women athletes’ struggles

When Shakya was growing up, she trained with a large team. But as she got older, the number of female companions kept declining.

“There were lots of girls who used to play, who used to want to be a national athlete, but maybe because of society or their families, they couldn’t continue their sport,” she said.

A similar scenario still persists for the emerging female athletes of Nepal.

Twenty-one-year-old Arika Gurung, who trains among the five-person national karate team, has also witnessed many of her former teammates leave the sport.

In the past, the team was much larger than five people, but some of her female teammates left because they faced sexual harassment from their trainers, while others left training after marrying and having children, Gurung said. The five members of the squad who remain keep training despite the sacrifices and hardships they have gone through.

“We have had bad days together, but we are still together because of it,” Gurung told the Post.

Throughout her career, Gurung and her family have faced scrutiny for allowing her to compete in a combat sport as a woman. She remembers people frequently telling her that karate “is a sport only men should do” and that “there is no path for women in this sport.”

On top of judgmental remarks, national karate players have endured financial hardship. While training to be selected for the national team ahead of the 19th Asian Games, the Nepali team trained without enough money, even for proper food. Gurung and her teammates would travel for more than an hour by foot and public bus, and train three times a day for upwards of 10 hours, having only eaten biscuits worth Rs10.

“It was a really hard time for us,” Gurung said. “We didn't have money, good facilities, or any resources.”

It was her commitment and dedication that helped her win a silver medal at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, in 2022.

She received Rs1.9 million for winning Nepal’s third-ever silver medal in the tournament. But as the promising player and team did not get sufficient support afterwards, she invested half of her earnings in the national team so that the group could continue to train and compete in future games.

Though the team is now better resourced, as karate athletes, they still cannot depend on a steady income. For all the players, the lack of financial security in professional karate made the decision to pursue athletics professionally after passing grade twelve a hard sell to their families.

“That was a very risky decision,” Gurung said. “It was our first step, but we took it without listening to our families or society.”

Though Gurung’s family has always been supportive of her athletic career, they thought she would be better off going into a more secure career path. Her family wanted Gurung to point to an example of another female athlete whose path to success she could follow, but she has no reference because no Nepali woman has found the level of success in karate that she is hoping to achieve. Without a clear role model, Gurung is determined to chart her path.

“I will be that person,” she said.

Though the members of the national team are all in their early twenties, they face pressure to prioritise family life over athletics, with friends and relatives encouraging them to get married as soon as possible. When Gurung and her teammates train through their menstrual cycles, they also hear warnings that training too hard will mean they won’t be able to have children.

“She’s a girl, she can’t do that, she can’t be muscular—those types of words always hit us,” Gurung said.

Though Gurung can see herself getting married at some point, she won’t consider it unless her partner is supportive of her continuing athletics.

“If I listened to people, I would have already gotten married,” she said. “As I am a girl, I’m not going to marry a man unless he supports me in this sport.”

Not stopping is a choice

After taking a break after the birth of her second child and returning to win two gold medals in both the individual and pair poomsae categories of taekwondo at the 13th SAG, Shakya has proven, both to herself and other female athletes, that women don’t have to struggle between family and athletics.

In her early days, Shakya recalls her parents’ friends expressing concern that if her competitions left any scars on her face, she would not be able to get married. Yet, she speared through the statements that tried holding her back.

Today, Shakya looks to examples of other female taekwondo athletes who have found success competing in the world championships through their 60s. Though she is focusing on running her store of Kelme athletic equipment, coaching at her taekwondo academy, and raising her children, she doesn’t plan on ever completely leaving behind her sport.

“I’m going to compete until I can’t anymore,” she said. “While my legs and hands are still moving, I’m gonna compete.”

Both Shakya and Gurung have been able to achieve historic wins in their athletic careers so far because they’ve chosen to ignore pressure to leave athletics behind.

“In Nepal, if you want to get out of the box, you have to think out of the box,” Gurung said.

Similarly, Shakya says she hasn’t just ignored criticism—she’s used it as fuel.

“Sometimes you don’t fully believe in yourself, but the bad comments, they have helped me do the work and have discipline,” Shakya said. “The bad words are bitter medicine.”

Besides martial arts, Nepali women athletes suffer similar problems and setbacks in other sports as well. Several women athletes involved in football, volleyball and athletics, among others, have regularly stressed with the Post that they have had to sacrifice the thought of a happy family while they are active in sports. All because they fear that marriage and having children could end their sporting career, for which they had struggled a lot.