Egyptian wrestlers keep vanishing abroad amid a sport in crisis

Cairo, Egypt – Four days after he disappeared from the Egyptian team camp at the 2026 Under-20 World Wrestling Championships in Slovakia last month, 19-year-old wrestler Ziad Hajjaj Abu Gabal posted a message on Facebook.

“I don’t want my mother and father to be upset with me,” he wrote on August 29. “I did this so I could see myself as a man. I won’t go back to Egypt, my beloved country, until I bring it honour.

“Everything I earn in a month is 700 Egyptian pounds [$13.7], and I’m an international [athlete] … After all this pressure, there was no way I could go back.”

On August 27, another Egyptian wrestler, Mohamed al-Shami, 23, had escaped while his team transited through Rome on their way home from the Mediterranean Games in Taranto, Italy.

In his Facebook post on August 29, Al-Shami said he had come to feel like a financial burden on his family and that he wanted to start earning money for them.

“At a certain point I felt my father was exhausted, that life had become too hard for him,” he wrote. “I’m the eldest of my siblings, so someone had to make a sacrifice and take responsibility.”

While the authorities in Egypt may now try to take legal action against the two athletes, their posts drew a wave of sympathy from Egyptians on Facebook, with many saying they understood the pressures that pushed the athletes to escape from a country mired in poverty .

Indeed, Hajjaj and al-Shami are far from the first Egyptian wrestlers to flee while abroad, and the hardships they describe are widely shared across the sport in Egypt.