Paris 2024 will be the third successive Summer Olympics featuring a contingent comprising refugees. This edition’s team is bigger than ever – 37 athletes from at least 11 countries competing in 12 different sports. They may have faced severe hardships and adversity in their journey to Paris, but they are not there merely to make up the numbers.
Just ask Cameroon-born boxer Cindy Ngamba, one of the team’s flag-bearers at Friday’s opening ceremony. “Just for our name ‘refugee Olympic team’ to be called out, refugees all around the world will acknowledge us,” she told Reuters. “We are seen as a team, we are seen as athletes, as fighters, hungry athletes who are part of a family.”
“We are not just refugees, we are athletes. (People) see us as refugees, but forget we are athletes with the same goals as the other countries represented here. We can achieve the same thing, win the same thing, have the same drive, the same hunger and the same energy,” Ngamba added.
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The Refugee Olympic Team came into existence in 2015. Their first Games was Rio 2016, with a 10-member contingent. As war and displacement ravage different regions of the world, the 37-member team in Paris will take part in disciplines such as swimming, canoeing, wrestling and taekwondo.
There is an understandable temptation to reduce their appearance at the Olympics as boilerplate inspirational stories, While there may be a justification to resist such an urge, strife has been an essential part of these athletes’ journeys to the quadrennial showpiece. None of them wish to shed the tag of a refugee.
Take Manizha Talash, a 21-year-old Breaker from Kabul. She had taken up the sport after being inspired by a stray video, and entered a male-dominated sphere where the pursuit of her passion became nearly impossible after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. After playing caretaker to her younger brother for a year while on the run in Pakistan, Talash made it to Spain as a refugee. Once spotted as a talented breaker, the IOC funded her training, six days a week, and included her in the refugee team.
Medals will be on the line at the Olympics but “being at the Games and in Paris,” Talash told TIME magazine, “that is winning to me.”
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Her compatriot Farzad Mansouri also sees sport as a means to escape the horrors of the recent past. The taekwondo athlete competed in Tokyo, where he was the flag-bearer for Afghanistan. He fled to the UK when the Taliban took over. He may have got a chance to compete at the Olympics once again, but his friend and teammate Mohammed Jan Sultani was not so lucky. He was killed in a suicide bomb attack at Kabul airport, and Mansouri is competing for himself as well as for the departed. “I really hope that we can find peace in my country and around the world,” he told The Guardian.
Some refugees arrive at the Games to keep their competitive fire burning. Saman Soltani, a 28-year-old canoeist, was not able to return to Iran after an artistic swimming programme in Spain two years ago. Taking shelter under a former coach in Austria, her only contact in Europe, and fascinated by the sport of canoeing, she rose through the ranks, becoming Austrian national champion.
Saman dreams of gold, perhaps under the Austrian flag at LA 2028, or perhaps for the refugee team. “I know I’m special, I knew it from when I was a child, because I always liked to do big things,” she told AFP. “I’m excited to see what I will do in the future. Because I know I want to be world famous.”
Others are aware of their status as role models. “It feels like there is a certain responsibility that comes with being part of this team,” 21-year-old runner Perina Lokure Nakang, born in South Sudan but grown up mostly in a Kenyan refugee camp, told elle.com. “We represent refugees, over 120 million people globally, and I want to show the world that we can do anything if we are given a chance.”
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Breaking down the Refugee Olympic Team:
– 37 athletes, originally from countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Cameroon, South Sudan and Syria, will be representing the refugee team that has its own emblem
– 12 different sports will see participants from the refugee team. These include athletics, weightlifting, wrestling, taekwondo, judo and breaking.
– The IOC has borne the expenditure on the functioning of the team and providing technical assistance.
– The refugee contingent will appear second in the opening ceremony, just behind Greece, carrying the Olympic flag.
