newyorker.com
early March, the International Olympic Committee announced that there would be a team of refugees at the Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer—five to ten athletes whose refugee status has been verified by the United Nations and who will compete under the Olympic flag. When Sven Spannekrebs, a swimming coach based in Berlin, learned of the announcement, he knew right away that one of his swimmers—Yusra Mardini, an eighteen-year-old Syrian who has a real shot at making the team—was about to get a lot of attention. But neither he nor Mardini realized just how much. The day the news broke, he “was called twenty times,” he said. “I took my phone and threw it into the fridge.” They arranged a meeting with the press, and, on a morning later that month, journalists from across Europe and as far away as Japan gathered in the conference room of a local sports club to meet the two. Mardini, clad in a black hoodie, skinny jeans, and gleaming white Adidas sneakers, looked fresh-faced and slightly bemused by all the fuss.
For both coach and swimmer, it was a rare day off from training. They were clear in their intentions: give the media what they wanted and then get back to work. “The main focus now will be swimming. Swimming, school, and German,” Spannekrebs said, sounding hopeful. “We are really happy about that.”
As shutters clicked and cameras rolled, Mardini told the story of fleeing Damascus last summer with her older sister, Sarah. The sisters made the month-long journey with their father’s cousin and a group of thirty other refugees, including a three-month-old baby, whom they met along the way. “We were like family,” Mardini said. The sisters travelled to Beirut and then to Izmir, Turkey, where they boarded a rubber dinghy bound for Lesvos, Greece. During the journey, the boat’s motor broke, leaving the passengers—many of whom couldn’t swim—stranded. The sisters and another young woman jumped into the water and, for the next three and a half hours, alternated between kicking and dragging the flimsy boat to safety. “I was thinking it would be a real shame if we drowned, because we are swimmers,” Mardini said. “I hated the sea after that.”
Arriving in Greece was only the beginning. From there, the sisters crossed through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, and Austria, on foot and by train, before arriving at the destination they’d had in mind the whole way: Germany. “We knew that Germany had really good swimmers,” Mardini said. Back in Syria, she trained with her dad, a swimming coach, from the age of three. As conditions in the country deteriorated, swimming became increasingly difficult. Mardini said that a bomb ripped holes through the roof of the facility where she swam. Eventually, she and her sister felt they had little choice. “Our house was destroyed and we didn’t have anything anymore, so we ran away.”
Some of the lowest moments of their long journey came in Hungary. Mardini recalls hiding in a cornfield at the Serbia-Hungary border for hours, only to be detained, after making it across on foot, at a train station. The Hungarian police were angry, she said, because she and her sister were laughing. “We were going to die in the sea, and now we’re going to be afraid of you?” she remembers thinking. “They took us to a camp in Hungary, and after that they told us we had to stay for two or three days. We ran away, of course.” Things finally started looking up in Austria. “Everyone was hugging me and giving me small Teddy bears and everything I wanted, even shampoo.” In the months since their safe arrival in Berlin, the sisters’ parents and younger sister have joined them and are in the process of applying for refugee status, as well.
The Mardini sisters were placed in a refugee camp when they got to Berlin, and one of their first questions when they arrived was where they might find a swimming club. An Egyptian translator who was working in the camp put them in touch with Wasserfreunde Spandau 04, and it was there that they met Spannekrebs. Mardini has made new friends at school and recently celebrated her birthday with her swim team, but a feeling of homesickness haunts her. When asked if there is a particular thing she misses from home, Mardini took a moment to think it over. “I really miss my friends in Syria, and my home, and my bed especially,” she said. “I miss everything very much—the ‘special thing’ was everything.”
Mardini hopes to become a pilot someday, but for now her focus is on the water. She and her coach initially had their sights set on the 2020 Games, in Tokyo, but things have moved swiftly. “In the last five months, her progress was really, really good. Better than I expected,” Spannekrebs said. “When it will happen it will happen.” If they can shave a few more seconds off of Mardini’s two-hundred-metre freestyle time, it may happen quite soon.
Spannekrebs estimates the time needed to qualify will be around two minutes, three seconds. In the last competition, Mardini’s time was two minutes, fifteen seconds, and her present best is two minutes, eleven seconds.
The I.O.C. has placed forty-three potential competitors on the shortlist for the refugee team, including a Congolese judoka living in Brazil (Yolande Mabika), and an Iranian Tae Kwon Do fighter living in Belgium (Raheleh Asemani). Thomas Bach, the I.O.C.’s president, said that the Committee’s members “want to send a message of hope for all refugees in our world.” If Mardini makes the team, there is a chance she will meet old friends and former teammates who will be competing as members of the Syrian team in Rio.
According to theGuardian, Syrian officials are keeping track of Mardini’s progress, presumably with the idea of persuading her to swim for Syria if she indeed qualifies. But at the press conference, Mardini was more interested in talking about swimming than politics, insisting that which nation she swims for was not important. “There’s no difference if I have the Olympic flag or my flag,” she said, “because I have both in my heart and it will be just about swimming.”
Afterward, Mardini retired to a side room with a cheese sandwich, and there she considered a question about her favorite stroke. She’s focussing on the two-hundred-metre freestyle to qualify for the Olympics, but she admitted a soft spot for the butterfly. “It’s really hard,” she said. “This is why I love it.”