Refugee team of 29 athletes picked for Tokyo Olympics

The refugee team for the Tokyo Olympics has 29 athletes competing in 12 sports, including a medallist at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games who left Iran citing institutional sexism.

The team selected by the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday was drawn from 55 athletes who fled their home countries and got scholarships to train for the games in a new home country.

Kimia Alizadeh is among them five years after she became the first Iranian woman to win an Olympic medal. She took bronze in taekwondo at the age of 18. Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini was also named in the refugee contingent.

The 29 athletes – a rise from 10 in the inaugural refugee team at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics – are also originally from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Congo, Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Venezuela.

They will compete in swimming, athletics, badminton, boxing, canoeing, cycling, judo, karate, shooting, taekwondo, weightlifting, and wrestling.

“You are an integral part of our Olympic community, and we welcome you with open arms,”

IOC president Thomas Bach told the athletes when announcing their selection, adding they would “send a powerful message of solidarity, resilience and hope to the world.”

The team will be managed in Tokyo by officials from the IOC and the United Nations’ Geneva-based refugee agency, the UNHCR.

“Surviving war, persecution and the anxiety of exile already makes them extraordinary people,” UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi said in a statement, “but the fact that they now also excel as athletes on the world stage fills me with immense pride.”

The refugee athletes will compete against 206 national teams with identifier EOR, the French acronym of the team name. The Tokyo Olympics are from July 23-Aug. 8.

Meanwhile, Olympic sports must do more to persuade Japanese people about how much work they have done to organise a safe Tokyo Games, athletics leader Sebastian Coe said on Tuesday.

Public opinion in Japan consistently maintains cancelling the Olympics that open on July 23. This is despite sports bodies working thousands of hours to create health protocols and “understanding the nature of the challenge,” World Athletics president Coe told a meeting of Summer Games sports officials.

“It does in large part seem to be the best kept secret in Japan,” Coe said of expertise gained organising events during the COVID-19 pandemic by 33 sports on the Tokyo program.

Olympic officials are getting daily reports of public opposition to the Olympics from the host country, Coe indicated.

Agencies