Of all the memorable moments from this year’s Olympics, there’s one in particular that will stay with me. As the spectacular parade of lighted boats sailed up the Seine to open the games, among them was a small craft filled with 37 competitors in white uniforms. Their flag carrier was boxer Cindy Ngamba, who won the first Olympic medal for her team a few days later.
Ngamba didn’t win that bronze for her home country, Cameroon. And the flag that Ngamba and her co-flag-bearer, Yahya al Ghotany from Syria, waved proudly was not the flag of either of their countries. It was the Olympic flag.
That’s because Ngamba and al Ghotany were members of the Refugee Olympic Team, made up entirely of athletes displaced from their home countries. The idea of an Olympic refugee team first emerged in 2016, a year of sky high global displacement — a trend that unfortunately continues today. Back then, 67 million people in the world were forcibly displaced — a population comparable to that of France and bigger than Italy or South Africa.
By the time the torch was lit in Paris for 2024, that figure had soared to 107 million. If “Refugee Nation” were a country, it would be the 15th most populous in the world — just behind Egypt. Like the rest of this population, the athletes on the Refugee Olympic Team have been forced from their homes by some combination of war, climate change, human rights violations, and economic crisis.
And this year the 37 members had something else in common.