Refugee Olympic Team: How Symbols of a Crisis Got to the Games

Tegla Loroupe, a former Olympian and the first African woman win a major marathon, and who still holds world records in three long-distance categories, has been working for more than a decade to use sports as a path toward peace and healing.

Before anyone had the notion of fielding an Olympic team made up of refugees, there was a June 2014 footrace on the dusty outskirts of Kenya's Kakuma camp, home to nearly 200,000 Africans displaced by violence and famine.

The goal, at the time, was relatively modest: to bring hope and fun to a place without much of either.

The peace activist, Loroupe, activist had organized the event with the United Nations Refugee Agency to mark World Refugee Day. She noticed a lot of talented men and women sprinting down the dirt roads, and thought the best of them ought to have a chance to run in international competitions.

"They at least could have a career whereby they'd be treated as people, with dignity and pride," Loroupe recalled thinking.

That led to the creation of a training camp outside Nairobi, and a series of trials — in which some entrants ran barefoot — to find those worthy of moving there.

At the same time, in the summer of 2015, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach became increasingly concerned about an exploding refugee crisis that had pushed to 20 million the total number of people who had escaped war and persecution in their homelands — Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, many others — and ended up in new countries. They included thousands of people pouring into Kakuma from civil war-torn South Sudan and other surrounding countries.

In October 2015, he made it official, telling the United Nations General Assembly that the IOC would support a team of refugees, and asked member countries for help finding prospects.

The concept was not completely unprecedented: In 2012, marathoner Guor Marial, who fled Sudan as a child and settled in the United States, ran as an Independent Olympic Athlete. Other athletes have competed independently, either because their countries were banned from the Olympics or did not have a national team.

But never before has there been a team made completely of displaced people.

"This will be a symbol of hope for all the refugees in our world, and will make the world better aware of the magnitude of this crisis," Bach said.

For Loroupe, the leap seemed sudden, but she already had a few dozen promising recruits.

The bigger challenge was to find others among the hordes of displaced people scattered around the world.

A wide array of athletes were submitted for consideration, and the IOC narrowed the list to 10. Some have been working with coaches for years, others just months. Some met Olympic qualification standards, and others came very close.

On June 3, Bach announced the final roster. It included two swimmers from Syria — one who escaped to Germany (Yusra Mardini) and another who ended up in Belgium (Rami Anis); a pair of Congolese judokas abandoned by their coach in Brazil three years ago (Popole Misenga and Yolande Mabika); an Ethiopian marathoner who drives a taxi in Luxembourg (Yonas Kinde); and five long-distance runners from South Sudan discovered by Loroupe (Yiech Pur Biel, James Nyang Chiengjiek, Anjelina Nadai Lohalith, Rose Nathike Lokonyen and Paulo Amotun Lokoro).

Some of the athletes' home countries are fielding Olympic teams themselves. But the 10 members of the Refugee Olympic Team will march in the opening ceremonies in Rio under the Olympic flag, to the Olympic anthem, and live as other teams do in the Olympic Village.

The team reflects the breadth of the current crisis, in which the number of refugees and forcibly displaced people (65 million total) around the world is the most since World War II, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.