Meisam Rafiei

Meisam Rafiei (30 years old) is an Iranian-born Icelandic martial artist in taekwondo.

He was the world youth champion in taekwondo in 2002 while representing Iran. He also won two World Military Championships for Iceland, in 2006 and 2008, and in 2017 was ranked 59th in the world in the 58-kilogram class.

He has competed multiple times in international tae kwon do championships, including World and European championships and he was a Nordic countries champion in 2016.

In January 2017, he was escorted off a plane while traveling with the Icelandic taekwondo team to the United States for the US Open. Born in Iran, he was stopped due to the travel ban by Donald Trump. He called the policy "racist" afterwards, stating that if he had been British-Iranian or Australian-Iranian, he would have been allowed to travel. On 1 February 2017, he was informed he could travel to the US to compete.