Rashford, Sterling … Kat Craig: how a ‘nerdy lawyer’ won top sport award

When the human rights lawyer Kat Craig was told she was going to be presented with the integrity and impact award at last month’s Sports Industry Awards for her role in the evacuation of female Afghan athletes and others as Kabul fell to the Taliban last summer, she tried to turn it down.

The award has been won by Marcus Rashford for his campaign against food poverty, Raheem Sterling for his anti-racism work and by the former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to publicly accuse the US gymnastics coach Larry Nassar of sexual abuse. Craig wanted to point the spotlight elsewhere.

Khalida Popal, one of the founders of the Afghanistan women’s national team who was responsible for exposing the horrific sexual abuses suffered by players by the former Afghanistan football federation president Keramuudin Karim and the fulcrum of the heroic evacuation efforts should receive it, argued Craig.

Unfortunately for Craig, Popal was one step ahead. “I nominated you, go get your award,” came back the message.

Craig had a point though. She was a cog in a small, hard-working machine and stresses that as we sit in her home in north London to talk about her career. It includes representing British Guantánamo Bay detainees and train crash victims, tackling protest law and deaths in police and prison custody, handling some of sport’s most traumatising sexual abuse cases and assisting the mammoth evacuation from Afghanistan.

“This is not an award that can be accepted by any single individual,” she says. “It was just a massive team effort.” Critical to the team, Craig says, were Popal, who “sees a problem or a challenge that others would shy away from because it’s seemingly impossible and just attacks it and then she succeeds”; the