The wall behind her is pockmarked and worn. She’s barefoot against a hard, cracked floor. And yet Achta Derib’s pose in this photograph by Antonio López Díaz, a finalist in the professional sports category at the Sony world photography awards, suggests reserves of determination that will carry her across continents to perform at the highest levels of her sport.
For Díaz, who has been documenting her journey since 2019, Derib’s story “stands as a symbol of resilience”. She was one of hundreds of girls from Chad who joined a pioneering gymnastics class at a school outside the capital, N’Djamena. Set up in 2016 by a Chadian Jesuit priest and a Spanish club president, with support from Spain’s Ramón Grosso Foundation, the class was the first of its kind in the central African country, where nearly half the population lives below the poverty line. Chad lacked gymnastics facilities, and the idea of a girl becoming a professional athlete in a country where female social mobility is extremely limited – three in five women are married before the age of 18 – seemed fanciful.
Nonetheless, Derib excelled in the class and in January 2020 she and three other 11-year-old girls moved to Spain to step up their training, staying on after Covid hit despite being thousands of miles away from their families. Their most ambitious goal, to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics, proved elusive but the team came fourth at last year’s African gymnastics championships in Marrakech, with Derib reaching the finals of the uneven bars and finishing ninth in the competition overall.
As the maths-covered blackboard in Díaz’s photograph intimates, gymnastics was only part of the equation. Moving to Spain meant that Derib and her peers got to continue their education, a rare opportunity in Chad where the female literacy rate is below 20% and only two in five girls complete primary school. Their achievements have proved inspirational back home: Chad now has five registered gymnastics clubs and a national gymnastics federation to help other aspiring athletes reach their potential – “something unthinkable just a few years ago”, says Díaz. At a time when the world’s richest countries are slashing aid budgets, Derib’s story is a reminder of how even modest interventions can prove hugely transformative in the lives of talented young people the world over.
