Beyond Borders: A Refugee’s Journey to the Olympic Games

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. In this opening episode of a new series of Unsung, we’re telling the story of the IOC’s Olympic Refugee Team.

This year, the Olympics will feature 36 athletes from 11 different countries of origin, competing in 12 different sports. At the Paralympics, eight athletes and one guide runner will make up the refugee team

This will be the team’s third appearance at the Games, after making its debut in Rio in 2016. Back then, there were close to 60 million displaced people globally. On the eve of Paris 2024, that number has now soared to well over 100 million and is still rising – that’s around 1 in 70 people living on our planet. Putting them all in one place would create the 14th most populous country in the world – and that population is increasing all the time.

But especially in a year typified by highly emotive elections all over the world, there is a tendency to distil the topic of refugees and immigration to faceless numbers and dispassionate data. But each statistic has a human story behind it. You’ll hear a couple of those in this episode.

Matin Balsini and Dorsa Yavarivafa were both born in Iran, the country where almost half of this year’s Refugee Team comes from Iran, giving some indication as to just how bad the situation is for Iranian athletes. 

The Iranian government exerts significant control over sports and often uses athletes for political propaganda, enforcing strict compliance with its ideological mandates. Those who dissent or fail to conform face dire consequences. 

It’s a repressive environment that stifles freedom of expression and forces many talented athletes to defect in search of safety and the liberty to compete without political interference. Athletes like Matin and Dorsa, who share their painful experiences and emotional journeys in finding a new home in the UK, and the stories of their successful route to the Olympics in Paris.

Many thanks to Matin and Dorsa for speaking to us just weeks before their appearance in Paris, and to the IOC for facilitating the interviews. 

Quotes:

Matin

"The one thing I really love about swimming is when you are in the water you cannot hear anything, you basically cannot see anything. And you can scream and no one can hear you."

"At 17, I decided to coach myself. And the hardest thing was, after one year when I improved a lot, the coaches were jealous. They didn't want me to improve because they thought that it made them look small."

"During the session I'd be swimming alone in the pool, and they would just turn the lights off.I had to swim in the darkness."

“I'm so happy that I am going to the Olympic Games and I'm super excited as well. But it's a bit sad for me because I can’t represent my nation anymore.”

Dorsa

“All I had with me for a whole year was my racket. It was just me, my racket, and my mom."

"I was about 14 when we left. It was really hard because I had to leave my family and my friends. I was quiet, depressed, and sad at first, because I was really shocked. But I had to do it, it just wasn't safe for my mom and me to stay in Iran."

"We tried to go, and they pointed a gun at us. They thought we were armed. And then they put us in jail. They separated me from my mom, which was really difficult. I remember how scared I was then. Imagine a 15-year-old girl being away from her mom in a jail. It was the worst nightmare of my life."

"Imagine representing your own country, there is such a power in that. But I'm not able to do that. So that is very sad, but I had to do it."

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