Largest Refugee Olympic Team For Paris 2024

 

Largest Refugee Olympic Team For Paris 2024

by Philip Barker

The Olympic Refugee team (EOR) for Paris 2024 is set to be the largest since the introduction of the EOR at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

It will include 36 members competing in 12 sports.

The team has been chosen with the approval of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Executive Board and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

Many of the athletes had received scholarships from the Olympic Refuge Foundation.

“We welcome all of you with open arms,” IOC President Thomas Bach told team members on a video call.

“You are an enrichment to our Olympic Community, and to our societies. With your participation in the Olympic Games, you will demonstrate the human potential of resilience and excellence.”

 

The Chef de Mission is Masomah Ali Zada, a cyclist originally from Afghanistan who competed for the EOR in the women’s time trial at Tokyo 2020.

I want to tell you: this will be your moment in Paris, enjoy it!” she told the team.

“I am looking forward to working with all of you to make this the experience of a lifetime.

It is believed that there are now around 100 million refugees worldwide but the question of accommodating displaced persons was raised over 100 years ago before the 1924 Paris Olympics.

Russian IOC member Prince Leon Ouroussoff had relocated to Paris after the Russian Revolution. He asked for recognition of an organisation that would allow Russian émigrés to participate in the 1924 Olympics and other sporting events.

The IOC Session minutes for Rome 1923 record: “in the present state of affairs the Olympic rules prevent Russian participation in the Games.”

Then in 1936, a “Fédération Sportive Russe,” unconnected with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet regime, made further representations during the IOC Session in Berlin.

“The Committee regrets that in spite of the sympathy which it feels for these unfortunate expatriated persons, it cannot permit their participation in the Olympic Games.”

After the second world war, many from Eastern Europe fled the Soviet bloc.

Count Antal Szápáry founded a Hungarian National Sports Federation and told Avery Brundage, then an IOC vice-president that: “Those sportsmen in exile are led by the true spirit of fair play, whilst Bolshevism takes sport for nothing but as a means of propaganda.”

A “Union of Free Eastern European Sportsmen” (UFEES) with headquarters in New York was led by Szápáry. This was supported by former Latvian IOC member Jānis Dikmanis.

It aimed “to represent as a common body, the interests of the exiled sporting youth.”

At the IOC session in Oslo shortly before the 1952 Winter Olympics, President Sigfrid Edström told members “that there exists in our times, a large number of refugees or athletes in exile, amongst them are to be found some former Olympic champions. They have come together and are now asking to be allowed to take part in the Games. The President wonders how this problem can be solved and commends it to the members.”

Then Thomas de Márffy-Mantuano, a Hungarian living in London, spoke on the organisation’s behalf at the 1952 IOC session in Helsinki.

“He refers to the plight the athletes without national status and their children are in, when desirous to participate in the Games. He appeals for the IOC’s good-will, trusting that it will find a solution.”

It was suggested they might enter and compete “under the colours of the International Red Cross or under the five Olympic rings.”

He asked the IOC to consider the question “with leniency.”

President Edström later reported that the Executive Committee “has gone thoroughly into this problem and that it has failed to find a solution which could permit the IOC to admit the refugee athletes to the Games.”

When the IOC response was sent, Lord Aberdare insisted they “convey deepest sympathy with the refugees and exiles.”

What was not clear until much later was the extent to which the lobby group was connected to the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The details were revealed in an extensive study by Toby Rider, a professor at California State University in Fullerton. It is thought that the IOC was unaware of the links.

In 1956, the Hungarian uprising prompted a hardline response backed by Moscow.

Olympic chancellor Otto Mayer took action, helping athletes escape from Budapest to participate at the Melbourne Olympics.

The Olympic Review records how Mayer “had succeeded in getting the Hungarian team from Budapest to Prague, the first modern Olympic truce. He subsequently helped it obtain plane accommodations to Melbourne.”

Mayer wrote later: “A dark cloud hovered over the Stadium. Athletes from Hungary were present despite the ‘civil war’ which was tearing their country apart. They left their country in tragic circumstances.”

Many of those who competed at the Games never returned home and sought refuge either in Australia or elsewhere.

Amongst those who did so was Agnes Keleti, the remarkable gymnast who won four gold medals. She eventually settled in Israel.

In the years which followed many others faced a similar predicament.

Uganda’s first Olympic champion John Akii-Bua later languished in a refugee camp after turmoil engulfed his country. He had won 400 metres hurdles gold in 1972 and did return to compete at Moscow 1980, but the privations he experienced exacted a toll.

The Balkan war in the early 1990s took a particular toll especially in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo which had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.

For IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch, Sarajevo held a strong emotional resonance as the 1984 Winter Olympics had been his first as President.

As war raged in Yugoslavia, the United Nations (UN) imposed sanctions and the Yugoslav football team was expelled from the final stages of Euro 92.

The official Olympic Review noted that the “IOC could not accept a decision of this kind and, in the teeth of considerable difficulties and by dint of direct negotiations with the United Nations Security Council sanctions committee, it prevailed upon the latter to revise its point of view to allow, after all, the participation of individual athletes.”

This allowed those from Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia to compete as Independent Olympic Participants (IOP) at the 1992 Barcelona Games.

The Bosnian capital Sarajevo was still under siege and citizens faced the danger of sniper bullets. In Olympic terms they were also “stateless” until their National Olympic Committee (NOC) was granted recognition at the eleventh hour.

A poignant appeal for peace in Sarajevo was made at the 1994 Winter Olympic Opening Ceremony.

The Olympic Truce is now formally acknowledged in a United Nations resolution.

In 2000, competitors from East Timor were invited to the Sydney Olympics, even though they did not yet have an NOC. They marched behind a banner as “Individual Olympic Athletes” and were given assistance to compete.

Yet in 2015, the UN Refugee Agency calculated that at least 65 million had been forced to leave their homes as a result of conflict and other disasters.

That summer, the IOC established a “Refugee Emergency Fund” of $2 million to help NOCs integrate refugees in sporting programmes.

“We realised the worldwide refugee crisis and then we saw these images and said there must be athletes among these people,” said Bach.

He admitted there had been no prior consultation with other international agencies before his proposal was made at the UN.

“I am happy to announce to this UN General Assembly that the International Olympic Committee will invite the highest-qualified refugee athletes to participate in the Olympic Games Rio de Janeiro 2016,” Bach declared. “These refugees have no home, they have no team, they have no national anthem. We are offering them a home in the Olympic Village together with all the other athletes of the world.”

In 2016, the Olympic Flame even visited the Eleonas camp in Athens where swimmer Ibrahim Al Hussein from Syria carried the Torch “on behalf of every refugee who has had difficulties.”

Rose Nathike Lokonyen, a runner from South Sudan, carried the Olympic flag as they walked into the Maracanã.

“When the athletes entered the stadium in Rio, the whole world stood up,” Chef de Mission Tegla Loroupe insisted.

Now for Paris 2024, the team will have its own visual identity with an emblem incorporating a heart.