Updated July 31, 2024 at 15:05 PM ET
Athletes from 206 countries waved their national flags as boats carried them down Paris’ Seine river during the Olympic Opening Ceremony last week.
One boat carried 37 athletes wearing stark white sweat suits with no clear country affiliation. The riders excitedly waved flags emblazoned with the Olympic rings. They smiled and posed for photographers along the river, making hearts with their hands and cracking jokes with each other as they passed.
They are the IOC Olympic Refugee Team, made up of athletes from 11 different countries. The team debuted at the 2016 Rio Olympics and has grown consistently since then.
Gonzalo Barrio, the team’s manager, told NPR’s Morning Edition, “these are athletes who can no longer compete for their country of origin and who cannot yet compete for their new country.” This year’s team is made up of athletes from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and more.
How athletes qualify, the struggles they face and the support they get from the IOC
Qualification for the team starts through the Refugee Athlete Scholarship Programme, where recipients are given support to compete internationally while displaced.
The IOC Executive Board then chooses athletes from the pool of scholarship holders to represent the organization in the Olympics. This year's team met for the first time just 11 days before the opening ceremony.
Some of these displaced athletes can have a hard time getting visas in order to travel to their competitions. Barrio helps them get “laissez-passer” documents, which are issued by the European Union to allow border crossing within their territory. While this is helpful in reaching the competition, it can be hard for the athletes to get travel visas for the return trip, if the document is not recognized where they are living, he said.
Barrio notes that the team can serve as a family of sorts for the athletes. “It’s a great leveler," he said. “It creates a community around them, it helps them a lot with language skills.”
Integration into a new country seems to be a goal of the team. He mentioned success stories, like Cyrille Tchatchet, who was a weightlifter on the Olympic Refugee Team in Tokyo. He’s originally from Cameroon and is now a British citizen representing Great Britain in other international competitions. He did not qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The IOC will continue to be a resource for the athletes after this year’s games conclude, Barrio said. They will be given opportunities to try to qualify for the 2028 games if they wish to continue competing, but the IOC will also provide resources for them to transition out of sports back into working life, like coaching or education programs.
What competing at the Olympics means for these athletes
Muna Dahouk, a a 28-year-old originally from Syria, competes in judo at the Olympics.
Dahouk learned judo when she was six from her father, who owned his own dojo. He died in 2015 in Syria.
“After my father died, we felt like it’s too dangerous to stay there without my dad. We were so young, and the situation there was so hard and dangerous. We knew that there was no future for us," Dahouk told NPR’s All Things Considered.
Dahouk and her family fled war-torn Syria in 2019 for the Netherlands, leaving her father’s dojo behind. But she kept competing and first qualified for the refugee team in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“I’m sure now my father, he’s so proud of me,” she said, adding that she hopes to return to Syria someday to rebuild her dad’s dojo.
Saman Soltani is a 28-year-old from Iran. Before she was a kayaker, she was a national artistic swimming champion in Iran. But the country’s religious restrictions held her back.
“Competing internationally is forbidden for the women in any sport, you cannot participate with the hijab. So basically, you couldn’t go more than that in Iran, unfortunately,” she told NPR’s All Things Considered. In the summer of 2022, Soltani trained with Olympic champions at an artistic swimming camp in Barcelona. She posted about it on Instagram, and her posts were noticed by Iran’s morality police, an organization that enforces the country’s conservative rules on Islamic dress and behavior.
“I was informed that I can’t go back anymore, because it’s dangerous. What I did was unacceptable according to the Islamic rules,” she said. She stayed with the only person she knew in Europe, finding refuge in Vienna.
She watched from afar as her peers were arrested during protests over the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. Amini was arrested by the morality police for violating the country's dress code.
“I couldn’t talk at all, I saw nightmare every night that two person come and want to force me to go back to Iran,” she said.
It was in that time of crisis that she decided to chase her lifelong dream of being an Olympian.
She trained in kayaking and qualified for the team.
"I'm really happy and I'm really proud that I'm part of this team. We lost our country, our flag, our everything. And in this situation, we decided to again fight one more time, two more times and several times,” Soltani said. “And now we are really close to our biggest dream."
Dahouk was eliminated by Panama’s Kristine Jiménez in the first round of the individual -57kg tournament, and will compete again on Aug. 2 in the judo mixed team event. Soltani will compete in the women’s kayak single 500m sprint on Aug. 7.
Editor's note: Quotes from Dahouk and Soltani originally aired in a July 30 interview on All Things Considered.
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