Pioneering Iranian athlete Zohreh Abdolahkhani looks straight into the camera and recalls the exact moment ice climbing stole her heart: the first swing of her axes into frozen ice, that electric rush of “I won this.” Titled Interview With Iranian ICE CLIMBER Meet Zohreh Abdolahkhani, the short film from AIME360 ai media & events captures the woman known across Iran as the “Ice Lady” reflecting on a career that has taken her from childhood hikes in the Alborz Mountains to the podium of the 2014 Asian Ice Climbing Championships—and now, as a PhD researcher abroad, to a lifelong fight for equality in sport. With zero views so far, the video already pulses with quiet defiance and hard-won optimism.

A Sport as Tough as the Terrain

Ice climbing is one of the most demanding disciplines in the climbing world: athletes scale sheer frozen waterfalls or artificial ice walls using razor-sharp ice axes (tools) and crampons, racing the clock in speed events or navigating technical routes in lead climbing. In Iran—a country of dramatic peaks, deep gorges, and harsh winters—the sport has flourished in recent decades. Iran regularly sends strong teams to UIAA Ice Climbing World Cups and has produced multiple Asian medalists. Yet for women, the path has always been steeper.

Zohreh Abdolahkhani, born in 1984 in Karaj, was never one to wait for permission. She began mountain climbing with her parents as a little girl, moved into rock climbing at 18 despite a coach’s doubts, and discovered ice climbing around 2010. Two years later she was national champion; in 2014 she became the first Iranian woman ever to win an international medal—bronze in the women’s speed event at the UIAA Asian Championship in Cheongsong, South Korea. She spent a decade on Iran’s national team, earned a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering, a master’s in sport management from South Korea, and is now a PhD research fellow at the University of South Eastern Norway focusing on sports, sustainability, and athlete rights.

The Fight Behind the Axes

In today’s interview, Abdolahkhani speaks with the same calm intensity she brings to the ice. She credits her family for unwavering support—“lucky” in a country where many female athletes face resistance at home. But she does not sugar-coat the realities: professional sports for women in Iran (and often worldwide) come with chronic underfunding, scarce training facilities, and sponsors who shy away because media coverage still tilts heavily toward male athletes. “They prefer men,” she notes matter-of-factly, echoing the same structural barriers that have kept women on the margins of Iran’s proud climbing scene.

She describes the emotional toll of representing a nation that both celebrates and constrains its female pioneers. Yet her message is one of resilience and generational responsibility. “We have to show that women can be in sports, in university, in art,” she says. Every axe placement, every rejected sponsorship, every quiet training session is part of a larger climb: proving that Iranian women belong on the sharp end of the rope.

From Podium to Platform

Abdolahkhani’s story has always been bigger than medals. After years of competing under the Iranian flag, she has become an outspoken advocate for athlete welfare, calling on international federations to protect those facing imprisonment or harassment at home. She cannot safely return to Iran now, yet her voice—measured, determined—continues to echo across borders. The new video, filmed in the same spirit as the channel’s recent feature on women in Zoorkhaneh, feels like another chapter in AIME360’s growing series on Iranian women rewriting the rules of “traditional” sports.

A Future Worth Freezing For

Ice climbing demands patience, precision, and the willingness to trust your tools when the world beneath you is literally melting. Zohreh Abdolahkhani has applied those same qualities to her activism. She tells viewers that change will come—“through time, through patience, through trust”—but only if today’s athletes keep swinging.

Watch her in this unfiltered interview and you’ll see more than an elite climber. You’ll meet a woman who has stood on Asian podiums and stared down systemic exclusion, who still believes the next generation of Iranian girls will find the ice a little less lonely because she refused to let the cold stop her.

The axes are sharp, the route is long, but Iran’s Ice Lady is far from finished. In her words, in her climbs, and in this latest testimony, she is carving a path that future female athletes can follow—all the way to the top.