Touran Shadpour's memories of her track and field career are imprecise. The details, she said, are at home in scrapbooks, the ones with clippings about the five national records Shadpour still holds more than two decades after they were set.
Most of the pictures that accompanied those stories are missing. Shadpour's mother cut them out of the scrapbooks because they showed a young woman running and jumping in shorts and tank top. They revealed parts of the body no Muslim woman is supposed to let a mixed public see.
Shadpour wore such attire at the 1974 Asian Games in Tehran, where she was sixth in the long jump, and the 1977 World Cup in Dusseldorf, where she was an alternate on the Asian team's 4x100-meter relay. It was the era in which Iranian women had been forced to westernize their dress under the shahs.
