Yusra Mardini used to be a typical teenager. She would chew the fat with friends, smartphone in hand, laughing but then came Syria’s civil war, the callousness of conflict, with its bombs, its suffering, its death and then this daughter of a swimming coach had two choices: exist in her homeland without hope, or escape for the freedom to dream.

“Maybe I’m going to die on the way,” she explains. “But I’m almost dead in my country. I can’t do anything.” Mardini and elder sister Sarah were seeking, like thousands of other Syrians, to make a new life in Europe by making the treacherous sea crossing in an inadequate boat from Turkey to Greece.

Swim For Life 

Her swimming ability became her last hope for survival when her dinghy, which was carrying about 15 more people than it was built for, broke down.‘I thought it would be a real shame if I drowned in the sea because I am a swimmer,’ she said.

“We were the only four who knew how to swim. I had one hand with the rope attached to the boat as I moved my two legs and one arm. It was three and half hours in cold water. Your body is almost like … done. I don’t know if I can describe that,” Mardini said.The journey took them 25 days, via Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and then finally Germany .

Finally A Home

Mardini’s first German home would temporarily be a refugee camp, and one of her first questions in this unfamiliar city concerned finding the nearest swimming pool. An Egyptian translator put the sisters in touch with Wasserfreunde Spandau 04, one of Berlin’s oldest swimming clubs.

“They saw our technique, saw it was good, they accepted us,” she says. After four weeks of training, Mardini’s coach, Sven Spannerkrebs, began making plans for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 – but in March of this year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced there would be a team of refugees at this summer’s Games in Rio to send “a message of hope for all the refugees in our world”. And in March IOC named Mardini on its shortlist of 43 refugees. Two months before the start of the Rio Olympics, Mardini receives an email from the IOC. She clicks, she reads, and jumps up and down as if she were on a pogo stick.Exhilarated, she nearly cries. She will compete at the Olympic Games.

‘It’s a different life in the water,’ she says. ‘You throw all of your problems out. It’s a different world to me.’ Yusra Mardini will compete for the Refugee Olympic Athletes team in the women’s 200m freestyle heats on Monday, 8 August.

“MY MESSAGE AT THESE GAMES IS JUST, ‘NEVER GIVE UP” Yusra Mardini Refugee Olympic Athlete

The story of  Yusra Mardini:

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