Woman turned to sports to avoid becoming child bride

Gülcan Palavan from the eastern province of Ardahan shares her inspiring story revealing how her struggle to escape from becoming a child bride led her to become an international athlete.

At a young age, Palavan decided to become an athlete to avoid her mother and sisters' fate, who ended up becoming child brides in the village.

Palavan took a long and difficult path full of hurdles on the way to become a runner in her life and has bagged dozens of medals to date.

Born in 1999, Palavan won her first medal in her hometown and ranked third in the World International Mountain Running Youth Cup in 2015 in Bulgaria, winning her first medal in an international competition.

She was born in a poor family to illiterate parents in the northeastern province of Ardahan as the seventh child of the family.

Her mother and two sisters got married at the age of 13 or 14, and her parents wanted her to do the same immediately after finishing her elementary school studies.

At that time, she was helping her father, who was a shepherd, running around to take animals under control. That's how she improved her running skills.

"One of my sisters married with a relative and the other with a neighbor. My sister loved run-ning, but my father did not let her," Palavan recalled.

"I did not want to end up like them. I wanted both to run and work. I eventually joined the Beşiktaş Sports Club when I arrived in Istanbul. But I was let go when I had an injury."

She later met a woman who lived abroad and financed her education expenses.

Palavan later reached out to Ardahan-born national athlete Özlem Kaya on Instagram and asked if she would be willing to be her trainer. Eventually, Kaya and...