Last summer, Yusra Mardini and her sister Sarah fled their home in Damascus for Beirut, Istanbul and finally Izmir in Turkey, where they managed to squeeze on to a dinghy crossing the Mediterranean to the Greek island of Lesbos. Thirty minutes into their journey, however, the motor stopped and the boat, carrying 20 people rather than the six or seven it was intended for, threatened to capsize.
Yusra, Sarah and another woman got into the water, pushing and pulling the dinghy until they reached the shore. They were the only ones on board who could swim. “I thought it would be a real shame if I drowned in the sea, because I am a swimmer,” she told a Berlin press conference on Friday. She has hated the open sea ever since.
In August, almost exactly a year after that treacherous crossing, Mardini is hoping her swimming ability could once again change her life, but in a much happier circumstance. Now living and training in Germany, the 18-year-old is one of 43 athletes across the world who, despite having fled their homelands and become refugees, are vying for the chance to compete in the Rio Olympics.
For the first time in its history, the International Olympic Committee announced earlier this month the nations competing at the summer Games will be joined in Rio by a team of refugees, made up of athletes who would otherwise find themselves stateless and excluded.
Team Refugee Olympic Athletes, or ROA, will compete under the Olympic flag and anthem, IOC chair Thomas Bach said, and on 5 August will march into the Maracanã stadium for the opening ceremony in penultimate place, immediately ahead of hosts Brazil.
The eventual team is likely to be small – Bach estimates only between five and 10 athletes will reach the qualifying standard in their respective sports – but after identifying 43 competitors who had the talent to potentially qualify, the IOC is providing training and support to give them the best possible chance.
Aside from Mardini, two others have been named: Raheleh Asemani, an Iranian taekwondo fighter who is now in Belgium, and Popole Misenga, who sought asylum in Brazil in 2013 while competing in Rio at the World Judo Championships for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Of the remaining 40 athletes, who are aged between 17 and 30, more than half were identified at the vast Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, about 55 miles (90km) from the border with war-torn South Sudan.
Pere Miro, the director of the IOC’s Olympic Solidarity programme, which is behind the team, said that after visiting the sprawling camp in January, he was “more convinced than ever that pulling together a refugee team could work.”
With the help of the Kenyan Olympic committee and a foundation started by the Kenyan distance runner Tegla Loroupe, Miro said, the IOC was able to organise professional trials, identifying 23 athletes it believed could make the grade for Rio. Most of them are middle- and long-distance runners from South Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda, he said, though the full shortlist is also understood to include refugee athletes from Ethiopia, Uganda, Mali, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
The athletes selected from Kakuma have been transferred to Loroupe’s training facility in Nairobi, while the camp itself, home to 180,000 people, has developed its own sports infrastructure, including a league with over 160 football teams and more than 60 basketball teams.
“I was touched in seeing how the people live in this camp,” Miro has said. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. They have nothing to do. The main activity that keeps them motivated and alive is sport.”
The Mardini sisters arrived in Berlin in September, where an Egyptian translator at their accommodation put them in touch with Wasserfreunde Spandau 04, one of the city’s oldest swimming clubs.
Coach Sven Spannekrebs immediately decided that Yusra was good enough to be part of the team. Over the next five months, he told reporters on Friday, Mardini made better progress than expected, and the club started to talk about whether she could be a candidate for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “But then things developed faster than we expected,” Spannekrebs said.
“A lot of people could take her as a role model,” the coach said. “Yusra is very focused. She has clear goals and organises her life around them.” Her level of organisation was almost German, he said – a comment which Yusra denied with a vigorous shake of her head. “We are like that in Syria!”
The teenager now enjoys the benefits of Germany’s elite sports school system, allowing her to train twice a day in an Olympic-standard pool next to her school. She gets up at 7am, trains for 2-3 hours, goes to classes before and after lunch, and then goes back to the pool.
Both Asemani, in Belgium, and Misenga in Brazil have also been given the chance to train alongside the national squads of their new home countries. Twenty-six-year-old Asemani fits her training in taekwondo around her job as a postwoman. Born near Tehran in 1989, she fled her home country in 2012 for reasons she hasn’t disclosed, leaving most of her family behind.
She had initially wanted to become a gymnast, she told a Belgian TV interviewer, but her father steered her towards taekwondo. She became Iranian number one, but was not able to travel to compete internationally.
Asemani, who trains with the Belgian national squad, initially feared she would only be able to compete in Rio if she was granted Belgian citizenship, which remains uncertain. But inspired by the IOC’s move in accepting refugee competitors, the World Taekwondo Federation agreed earlier this year to allow her to compete in its qualifying tournament as an independent athlete.
In Istanbul in January, fighting under the WTF flag, she won the finals of the female under 57kg tournament, meaning she has already attained the qualifying standard for the Games. “Rio is a dream for me,” she said. “Hope has carried me to the Olympics, now I will give all I have to win.”
In Rio, meanwhile, Misenga told the Guardian earlier this year that he was forced to flee his home country, which has been ravaged by a deadly and long-running civil war, after his mother was killed and his brother went missing. “I wondered sometimes how to live when so many people were dying,” he said. “I’ve seen too much war, too much death. I do not want to get into that. I want to stay clean so I can do my sport.”
Along with another Congolese judoka, Yolande Mabika, who fled at the same time, he now trains with Brazil’s national squad three times a week.
Before she fled Damascus, Mardini was professionally supported by the Syrian Olympic Committee in Damascus. The tricky question is whether, if she does qualify, the Syrian team would seek to persuade her to compete under her home flag – a potential propaganda coup for the Assad regime.
The IOC’s Pere Miro said they had approached the Syrian national Olympic committee for approval, who had said they did not have a problem with Mardini competing for a refugee team. But officials confirm that Syria has been monitoring the young swimmer, asking for regular updates on her progress.
Mardini herself was non-committal when asked about the issue. “Of course I miss my homeland,” she said, especially her bed in her home. “Maybe I will build my life here in Germany, and when I am an old lady I will go back to Syria and teach people about my experience.”
Qualifying for the Olympics, Mardini said, would send a message to the world. “I want to make all the refugees proud of me. It would show that even if we had a tough journey, we can achieve something.”
