The Trailblazer

Afsana Nawrozi fled from Afghanistan to Arizona to pursue her dreams—to become an elite cyclist, get a quality education and shape her own destiny.

Words JAMES STOUT Photography JASON PERRY

“I always tell myself I am strong,” says Nawrozi, who was photographed near Sedona, Arizona, on January 23.

Most accomplished as a road racer, Nawrozi finished second in Afghanistan’s national championship in 2020.

P

eople come from all over the world to ride among the red rock on the trails in Sedona, Arizona. After a few days, most return to where they came from with nothing but memories and maybe a few bruises to remind them of their visit. But for Afsana Nawrozi, who first touched tire to Arizona’s trails in October 2021, Sedona is her new home.

Nawrozi, 18, is a gifted road cyclist. In 2019, she qualified for the national team in her native Afghanistan. And the following year she finished second in the national championship. Now, after just a few months of riding the technical chunky trails here in Sedona, the road rider has progressed from a mountain biking novice to training with her school’s advanced group. She likes to ride the Baldwin Trail, she says, proudly showing off her new Santa Cruz Juliana mountain bike, making sure to point out all the matching purple accessories. “At first I crashed, but now when I ride that trail I look back and think, ‘Oh, I crashed there?’” she says. “It’s easy now.”

Nawrozi has quickly learned that rock gardens are far easier to overcome than the misogyny that is baked into much of Afghan society. As Nawrozi strolls around her high school campus in Sedona, she shows me the scar left from surgery to repair a broken collarbone after a car hit her. “I don’t think it was an accident,” she says. She was harassed so often in Afghanistan, she says, that every ride felt risky. Once, she recalls, she traveled to Bamyan, the heart of Afghan cycling, for a national race. At the end of a training ride, some men pulled up alongside her and threw mud and stones at her. She cried but still raced the next day—and at 15 became the youngest rider selected for the national team. “I always tell myself I am strong,” she says.

Afghan girls have been front and center in the justification for two decades of war in that country, but these conversations have often been about them and not with them. Women and girls, Nawrozi among them, embraced the offer of liberty and equality, turning those abstract political notions into bike-race trophies and university degrees. While men fought with guns, young women like Nawrozi fought every bit as hard to liberate themselves. She’s still not sure who she wants to be, but when the question is raised, she holds her hands like scales, motions to one side and says, “Pro bike racer.” Then she looks at the other and says, “Engineer.”

Nawrozi already has gone a long way to pursue her dreams, both academic and athletic. In 2016, she left her family’s village to move to Kabul and live with her sister, who was attending college there. It was in Kabul that she first started cycling seriously. Soon after, she entered a race called Pedal for Change and finished fourth. That result inspired a journey that would eventually bring her to the trails here in Sedona, where she spends her afternoons cleaning chunky technical climbs that numerous enduro bros could be seen walking.

Back in her native country, the men who threw stones at her—members of the ultraconservative political organization known as the Taliban—are back in charge, meaning that it would be unsafe to pursue her dreams there. Nawrozi is happy in Sedona—she has her own room and three bikes to choose from on any given day. But that doesn’t mean it has been easy to leave her home and family behind, move across the world and continue her education in a relatively new language. Plus, she’s still trying to master the use of a dropper post.

Ever since she took her first ride without training wheels at age 7, Nawrozi has loved the speed and thrill of cycling. Her father bought the little pink bike she learned on. “He has always been my biggest supporter,” she says. Since then, cycling has taken her all over Afghanistan, helped her make friends at home and abroad and become her passion.

After entering that first race, she took to the sport quickly and began training with the national team in Bamyan, a city whose province made global headlines in 2001 when the Taliban razed two ancient Buddhas. Nawrozi went on to set several speed records on climbs around Bamyan. Her meteoric rise suffered a setback when she was hit by that car in December 2019—her clavicle was able to be repaired, but her bike was destroyed. She thought her cycling career was over, but Ahmad Farid Noori, who founded the nonprofit organization MTB Afghanistan and is from the same village as Nawrozi, helped her get a new bike.

When 2020 began, Nawrozi had hoped to travel and race abroad, representing the future of her country with her teammates. But the pandemic, and then the regime change, altered her plans.

Still, her ambitions to succeed remained. In her new home in Arizona,

Nawrozi says she wants to race for fun—and to “make cycling a normal thing for women in Afghanistan.”

“In Afghanistan, you have to be an activist first and a cyclist second.”

there are far more races to choose from, and she’s taken with the idea of trying the long-distance gravel races that have become hugely popular in the U.S. She’ll race “not just for fun,” Nawrozi says when I ask, but “to make cycling a normal thing in Afghanistan for women.” She also wants to win more trophies like the ones she left behind in Afghanistan.

This fusion of athletics and activism is important to her. “In Afghanistan, you have to be an activist first and a cyclist second,” she says. “You have to stand and fight for what you want.” Given the struggles she’s overcome, riding 200 miles on dirt roads doesn’t seem so hard.

Nawrozi’s journey to Sedona was a marathon of sorts, too. She left her home and family last summer on a trip that she thought would last only a few days. She’d just been accepted to her dream school in Arizona. Nawrozi took the first flight of her life, to Islamabad, Pakistan, to collect a visa. Her plan was to return to Kabul after a few days, make preparations and then fly to the U.S. for a year of high school followed by a university education. When she set off, “everything was OK, as usual,” she says. “We were still training, and most Fridays we did our long ride from Kabul to Bagram. Sometimes, we’d hear something that made us avoid going that far away from the city, but even when the Taliban attacked some of the provinces, the capital was safe.”

The capital didn’t stay safe for long. In August 2021, the chaos and tragedy that ensued in Kabul was beamed onto TV screens across the world, including the one in the guest house in Pakistan where Nawrozi was staying. She worried for her family, her country and her future. The next few weeks were fraught with tension, as Nawrozi struggled with the desire to return home and the very real worry that doing so would mean giving up her educational and sporting dreams.

The Taliban made the decision for her by closing the border to Pakistan. “My parents said, ‘Just go, don’t come back,’’’ she says. But she had nowhere to go. She was stuck in Islamabad with her Pakistani travel visa running out and the U.S. visa system crumbling under the weight of applications following the fall of Kabul.

I first met Nawrozi by email while she was stuck in Pakistan. Her life was completely up in the air, but she conversed easily in English and ended each email with a smiley-face emoticon. Her happiness, I’d come to learn, is something she’d fought hard for and wasn’t willing to give up. “I am really worried that the Taliban will come to my house and search for my bike and all my achievements,” she said in one of our first email exchanges. “I am sure they’ll destroy all of them.” She was worried about her family, too—especially her father, mother, five sisters and baby brother. (Most of the family has since found safe refuge outside of the country.)

Nawrozi stayed in Islamabad for 90 stressful days. She would occasionally sneak out for a furtive run outside—she also has run two marathons—but otherwise she remained in the guest house, waiting for an email from the U.S. Embassy about her passport and hoping her family could find a way out. Then, in October, she finally got an email that her visa had been approved. “I was just so happy,” she says.

A few days later she was on a 29-hour marathon from Islamabad to Chicago. Her journey continued to Arkansas before eventually bringing her to the red rocks near Sedona, where she and I spend a chilly Saturday morning petting the horses at her school, lamenting the quality of American tea and discussing what’s next for a talented young bike racer whose favorite books are the autobiographies of Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai.

Nawrozi was born years after the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, so she’s never known life under the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—as the Taliban calls its state structure. But she has seen more than her fair share of hardship. She is Hazara, an ethnic minority group in Afghanistan that has been the subject of much discrimination and violence; most Hazara are Shi’a Muslims, putting them at odds with the Taliban.

In her new home in Sedona, she won’t have to deal with such persecution, but she will have to navigate the transition to high school (and then university) in a new country, as well as the balance between her academic and athletic dreams.

Nawrozi’s bikes were a gift from pro cyclist Starla Teddergreen and her husband, Gino Zahnd, who have been looking after Nawrozi on her school vacations and helping her adapt to life in the U.S. Over the holidays, Teddergreen and Zahnd rented a house in Sedona and rode with Nawrozi; they went sightseeing—the teenager experienced the strange sensation of seeing her first church with a graphic depiction of the crucifixion—and she worked on landing her first jumps on one of the dozens of trails near the school. She says Zahnd’s Dari is improving rapidly, and she’s been helping them make rice the Afghan way.

Now Nawrozi has all the support she could want; everyone who hears her story wants nothing but the best for her. Nawrozi says she’s been struck by how kind people in America have been. But some of that kindness from strangers probably comes because they view her life through the lens of a tragedy that was totally out of her control. In the next few years, she plans to use the control she took back to make sure she’s known for things of her choosing.

Sometimes, she says, it’s strange going to sleep alone in her own dorm room at school, and she leaves the light on—she’s used to sharing a room with her sisters. But now that she knows they’re safe, she doesn’t lie awake worrying about them. Her family, she says, is “so happy for me, so, so happy.” There’s lots to adapt to in Arizona, from the food in the dining hall to doing her own laundry to navigating the expanse of indecision that awaits at huge American supermarkets.

But she’s embracing each of these choices with the same enthusiasm that she does her sport. When asked which races she wants to enter this year, she laughs. “So many,” she says, contemplating all the road, mountain bike and gravel events she could pack into her summer holiday. Some days, she says, it’s a struggle to find time to both ride and do homework, but her coach says that she seems to manage.

One of her cycling heroes is three-time world champion Peter Sagan, not just for his sprinting but also for his technical abilities—and the way he rides up and down stairs on his road bike. Sagan also is famous for his “Why so serious?” tattoo and his apparent ability to both have fun and dominate the sport at the highest level. Nawrozi relates to how he doesn’t seem to take any setback too seriously or let success change him.

One of the first Dari phrases Nawrozi taught me was “ ” (pronounced baraka buri). It means “let’s go,” and she says she’s taught other cyclists at her school to say it, too. The phrase seems like a life philosophy as well as a command for a young woman who has embraced every opportunity she is offered. Nawrozi doesn’t know yet where her journey will take her, and she’s OK with that. But wherever it does lead, her bike will go with her, and she’ll be able to feel just like she did at 7 when her dad took the training wheels off that little pink bike.

As our day-long interview comes to a close, Nawrozi expresses her own hopes of how people will interpret her story. “I just want people to know that as an Afghan girl, I am so strong,” she says, standing by her bike on an Arizona trail. “I have overcome so many challenges and I am just starting my journey here.”