Tsimanouskaya had been expected to fly to Warsaw after Poland granted her a humanitarian visa. It is not clear if Austria is her final destination.
The Austrian Airlines flight left Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on time at 11:05 a.m. local time and was due to arrive in Vienna at 4:05 p.m. on August 4, according to the flight tracking website flightaware.com.
Tsimanouskaya arrived early on August 4 at the airport from the Polish Embassy, where the 24-year-old athlete took refuge on August 2 after refusing to allow Belarusian team officials to force her onto a flight to Minsk a day earlier.
She did not talk to a group of waiting reporters, but she told the AP earlier in a video interview that team officials had “made it clear that, upon return home, I would definitely face some form of punishment.”
She said the tipping point for her was when team managers told her that “other people” had ordered them to send her home from the Olympics and that they were “merely ordered to make it happen.” She said she feared she would be in danger if she returned to Belarus.
Dzmitry Dauhalionak, the head of Belarus’s delegation at the Olympics, declined to comment, saying that he has “no words,” according to the AP.
Earlier, Belarus’s National Olympic Committee told a state-run news agency that it was closely monitoring the situation and cooperating with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has launched an investigation into Tsimanouskaya’s accusations.
The IOC said on August 4 that it would question two Belarusian team officials who were allegedly involved in trying to remove Tsimanouskaya from the Olympics. IOC spokesman Mark Adams says it is part of a disciplinary case opened “to establish the facts” in Tsimanouskaya’s case.
The probe will hear from the two officials alleged to have told Tsimanouskaya she would have to return home early because of critical comments she made on social media. The IOC identified them as Artur Shumak and Yury Moisevich.
Tsimanouskaya’s troubles began when she said her coaches told her she would be participating in an event she had never competed in. She then criticized the move on social media and accused officials of an attempted kidnapping to forcibly repatriate her.
Tsimanouskaya dismissed any notion that she had planned to seek a way to depart to a third country.
“Everything that is happening now absolutely wasn’t in my plans,” Tsimanouskaya told the AP.
Her husband, Arsen Zdanevich, told the AP that he decided to leave Belarus when Tsimanouskaya told him she wasn’t coming back. Zdanevich is currently in Ukraine, an Interior Ministry source told Reuters. He is quoted by several news outlets as saying he is hoping to join his wife in Poland.
