As many as 29 refugee athletes will head to Japan in July to take part in the Tokyo Olympics 2020 to compete across 12 sports.
It’s a sharp increase from the 10-member inaugural refugee team that participated in the 2016 Summer Olympics held in Rio de Janeiro.
The 2020 refuge team will compete in athletics, badminton, boxing, canoeing, cycling, judo, karate, shooting, swimming, taekwondo, weightlifting, and wrestling.
The athletes originally come from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Congo, the Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela. The highest number of athletes – nine – come from Syria.
The refugee team will be represented by the identifier EOR, which is the abbreviation of the team’s name in French. The team will compete against 205 national teams at the Tokyo Olympics, which are set to be held from 23 July to 8 August.
These athletes fled their home countries and got scholarships in a new home country to take part in the Summer Olympics.
“You are an integral part of our Olympic community, and we welcome you with open arms,” said Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, which selected the athletes from 55 candidates.
The refuge team competing at the Games would “send a powerful message of solidarity, resilience and hope to the world,” he said when announcing the selection on Tuesday.
Among the selected athletes is Iranian-origin Kimia Alizadeh, who won a bronze medal in taekwondo at age 18 at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
“I have a great feeling to have made a decision for my life that would definitely change my future,” Alizadeh, who is now based in Germany, told reporters in January last year.
Another athlete, Syrian-born swimmer Yusra Mardini, is also part of the refugee team for the second time. She took part in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in the 100-meter freestyle and butterfly swimming competition.
“I feel very, very lucky to be part of the team,” the 23-year-old Mardini, who now lives in Germany, said at an online news conference hosted by the IOC.
“In an ideal world we would not have to have a refugee team, but this is the situation right now,” she said, acknowledging a “huge responsibility” to represent 80 million refugees across the world.
The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, has welcomed the team’s announcement by the International Olympic Committee.
“They are an exceptional group of people who inspire the world,” UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi said in a statement. “UNHCR is incredibly proud to support them as they compete at the Tokyo Olympics. Surviving war, persecution and the anxiety of exile already makes them extraordinary people, but the fact that they now also excel as athletes on the world stage fills me with immense pride.”
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