‘This team is a message of hope’: behind the scenes with the Refugee Olympic Team

Farida Abaroge jogged across the athletics track in Normandy in the early morning light. “When you’ve known hard times, mental and emotional fitness is just as important as physical form,” she said as she trained for the 1500m at the Paris Olympics. Abaroge is part of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Refugee Team, which represents more than 100 million displaced people. “This team is like a family,” she said.

When Abaroge, 30, fled her native Ethiopia eight years ago because of persecution, she was a karate black belt, footballer and would-be track runner who dreamed of one day competing at the Games but could not see how. Her gruelling search for safety lasted more than a year, taking her to Sudan, then to an Egyptian refugee camp, then to Libya, where she was imprisoned, and finally to France in 2017 where she was granted asylum. Physically wrecked from hardship, lack of food and stomach surgery that had gone wrong en route, Abaroge made an astonishing return to sport, taking up athletics.

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She credits the local town hall and refugee charity workers in north-eastern France with setting her back on the path to the Olympics. “When I arrived in France, alone, they asked me what my passion was in life. I said sport. They took me to a shop to buy some trainers and kit and I started running.” She now combines twice-daily training with her full-time job packing parcel deliveries in a warehouse in Strasbourg. Support from the IOC allowed her to take two months’ unpaid leave from the warehouse to compete in the Paris Games. “The workers there are all rooting for me,” she said.

Created in 2015, the Refugee Olympic Team first took part in the 2016 Rio Games, with 10 athletes in three sports. But this year it has grown to 37 athletes, whose countries of origin range from Iran, Syria and Afghanistan to Eritrea and South Sudan, competing in 12 sports including cycling, swimming, taekwondo, judo and breaking. The team is so important for the IOC that the refugee athletes will appear in second position at the Paris opening ceremony, after Greece, carrying the Olympic flag.

The team spent several days in Bayeux in Normandy this week for training and team building before arriving at the Olympic Village in Paris. They cycled together to one of the D-day Normandy landing beaches at Arromanches-les-Bains, where a tour guide recounted details of the fight against fascism in the second world war.

On the beach, Farzad Mansouri, a taekwondo athlete, remembered athletes who had died. Mansouri competed for Afghanistan in the Tokyo Olympics, aged 19, and was the Afghan flag-bearer in the opening ceremony, but for his second Games he will now compete as a refugee. Soon after Tokyo, in the summer of 2021, he fled Afghanistan with only his Olympic kit as luggage, amid the tens of thousands trying to board evacuation flights as the Taliban returned to power. He spent months in a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi before arriving in the UK, where he is now based in Manchester. But his taekwondo teammate, Mohammed Jan Sultani, 25, was killed in a suicide bomb attack at Kabul airport. “It was a really hard moment when I heard that I lost my friend,” Mansouri said. “I now really hope that we can find peace in my country and around the world.”

Many of the refugee athletes credited sport for helping them cope with displacement, bereavement and starting again from nothing. “I owe my trainer my life,” said Ramiro Mora, 26, a Cuban weightlifter who will compete in the 102kg category in Paris. Mora had been on the Cuban team before joining a travelling circus. He worked for three years at Blackpool Tower Circus, part of an aerial act, where he was the base throwing acrobats high into the air and catching them. “That requires strength and technique because you’re holding your partner’s life in your hands, working at eight metres high,” he said. He was later granted asylum in the UK and lives in Bristol, where he holds two British weightlifting records and has a three-month-old daughter. “When I’m out there I think about the sacrifices I’ve made to get here – the hours of training, far from my family, and I try to do my best in every single movement,” he said.

Manizha Talash , 21, who left Afghanistan in 2021, is the only refugee athlete taking part in a new urban sport in Paris: breaking. As a 17-year-old girl starting out in Afghanistan, she took part in breakdancing behind closed doors. Now based in Spain, she was pleased to be breaking in the open. “To form one big team, despite coming from so many different countries, is very motivating,” she said. “Just the fact that I’m here at the Olympic Games is a message for refugees as well as all the kids in Afghanistan.”

Many athletes had been through difficult years in transit and in asylum seeker centres with no space to train. Iman Mahdavi, 29, was a seven-time national junior wrestling champion when he left Iran in 2020, arriving in Italy via Turkey. “When I became a refugee, wrestling was the only hope for me. At first I couldn’t train in clubs, so I started running to stay active, to deal with the stress.” He now combines training with his job as a security guard at a Milan disco and has a tattoo of the Olympic rings on his chest.

Arab Sibghatullah, who was on the Afghanistan national youth judo team before fleeing Kabul, had travelled through 13 countries, mostly by foot after nightfall, trying to stay in physical shape but fearing he’d never compete again. He was given asylum in Germany. “This team is a message of hope,” he said

The British-based boxer, Cindy Ngamba – who is unable to return to Cameroon because she is homosexual, which remains a criminal offence in the country – is tipped to become the first athlete to win a medal for the refugee team. Ngamba, who has been through school and university in the UK, and has a degree in criminology, said: “We’re going out there as a unique team, as a family, and I hope refugees all around the world can look at us, be humble and motivated to see themselves in a couple of years and believe in what they can achieve.”

At 20, the badminton player, Dorsa Yavarivafa, who left Iran with her mother aged 14 and now studies sport science at Middlesex university, is the youngest on the team. Her father introduced her to badminton but had never watched her play in public until recently because of rules in Iran that separate men and women in sport. She said her message to all displaced people in sport was: “Keep training, never give up.”