“Success Against All Odds”: 5 Refugee Olympic Team Athletes To Watch In Paris
“Ask any member of the Refugee Olympic or Paralympic Teams, and you will find that sport has been a lifeline for them,” says former Olympic swimmer and Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, Yusra Mardini. “Swimming quite literally saved my life. But more than that, it gave me something to focus on when my life was turned upside down in Syria, and then when I reached a new and unfamiliar home in Germany.”
Mardini, now a Eurosport presenter, competed in both the Rio and Tokyo Games, having fled war-torn Syria in 2011 aged 17 with her sister Sara and two cousins. A keen swimmer since the age of nine, she competed across the globe but when war broke out, she made the treacherous crossing via the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, then overland to Germany. When the boat’s motor failed, she and her sister Sara jumped into the sea and struggled for three hours to drag it to shore.
Her swimming coach in Germany, Sven Spannekrebs, helped Mardini to join the Refugee Olympic team, which she remembers as “one of the proudest moments of my life. Suddenly, I wasn’t Yusra the refugee, I was Yusra the Olympian. You can’t imagine how much this impacted my self-esteem and identity”.
She describes the 2024 team as a group of “incredible people who deserve to be celebrated for their determination and success against the odds”. She is also keen that their refugee status doesn’t define them. “It is something that happens to someone rather than something they are born with,” she says. “Refugee or not, everyone has dreams and goals, and can achieve them given the right opportunities.”
5 Refugee Olympic Team Athletes To Watch In Paris
1. Breaker Manizha Talash – At 17, Talash saw a video of Afghan breaker Sezdah spinning on his head. Transfixed, she visited the Kabul club where he trained. Talash received death threats, the crew’s club was targeted by a bomb, and was eventually shut down. When the Taliban returned to power in 2022, Talash and her 12-year-old brother fled to Pakistan and were eventually granted asylum in Spain. In February this year, she joined the Refugee Olympic Team. The now-21-year-old told Reuters, “I’m doing something for the women in Afghanistan.”
2. Badminton Player Dorsa Yavarivafa – Aged 15, Yavarivafa fled Iran in 2018 with her mother, making it to Birmingham at the end of 2019. During this journey, she was jailed three times. Despite being a promising player, Yavarivafa was repeatedly rejected by the Iranian national team without explanation. In the UK, a coach put her in touch with former Iranian Olympian Kaveh Mehrabi, who helped her apply for the Refugee Athlete Scholarship programme. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. Doesn’t matter where are you living now,” she says, “Dreams come true.”
3. Weightlifter Ramiro Mora – In 2019, Mora left Cuba for the UK. For the first three years, he worked for the Blackpool Tower Circus. In 2021 he went to a political protest in Havana, but he feared he would be imprisoned, so he returned to England and applied for asylum. He trained at the London Olympic Weightlifting Academy and now holds British records in three bodyweight categories. In December 2023, he was granted refugee status, and awarded an Olympic refugee scholarship. He sees the Games as “a platform to inspire and represent hope for refugees all over the world”.
4. Cyclist Eyeru Tesfoam Gebru – The cyclist first learned to ride a bike in Ethiopia at the age of 16. Six months later, she joined a local cycling club and her talent secured her selection for the 2015 African Continental Championships. From there, she was invited to train at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Switzerland in 2017. She returned to Ethiopia in late 2020 and two weeks later, civil war broke out. In the summer of 2021, she escaped to Addis Ababa, then requested to be entered in the cycling World Championships. She didn’t make it to the event – instead, she disappeared, as representing her country “would have been supporting the genocide of my people”. Four months later, in France, she was given protection, a room, and a basic bike. By August 2022, she had joined a French women’s road cycling team, and will race for the Refugee Team in Paris.
5. Judo Athlete Kavan Majidi – In 2019, Majidi – who grew up in Iran – was prevented from participating in judo events. He was forced to decide whether to stay and give up on his dreams, or leave and chase them. In 2020, he spent three months trekking over 1,300km – mostly on foot – to Scotland. He arrived in November 2020 and was awarded a Refugee Athlete Scholarship, training with the Scottish team. He has competed at both the World and European championships and won silver at the Scottish Open Championships in 2023.
Laura Potter is a freelance editor and writer whose work has appeared in The Observer Magazine, The Guardian’s Saturday magazine, The Times Magazine and Women’s Health
