A new chapter for a constant survivor
After escaping death in the Aegean, Syrian Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini heads to Paris to give voice to other refugees
Our meeting was originally scheduled to take place on Lesvos, the eastern Aegean island where Yusra Mardini would swim in the same waters where she once risked her life as a refugee nine years ago. But I knew it would be a very emotional mission for her and time was scarce, so I suggested meeting in Athens as soon as she returned. The first time I tried to interview her was in 2018. I was working at the Buenos Aires Summer Youth Olympic Games and Yusra was there as an “athlete role model.” She had very politely declined to speak to me because she knew one of the interview topics would be her older sister Sarah, who was imprisoned in Athens’ Korydallos Prison, accused of participating in a migrant smuggling network as a volunteer in Lesvos.
I tried two more times – once she fell ill with Covid-19, and the other was after the release of a film based on her life (“The Swimmers”) by Netflix, which decided which media outlets would get interviews and never responded to my request. Up until the last moment, I feared something would again happen to cancel our meeting, but Yusra appeared at her hotel’s poolside cafe on the dot, at 9.30 a.m. Wearing no make-up and with her hair tied in a simple ponytail, she was relaxed, and I soon understood that she was now ready to talk about everything.
“I was not brave enough back then,” she admits today about the period when her sister was in prison. “My manager at the time was telling me I shouldn’t talk about it. I still feel bad that I never visited my sister in prison. I was the only person she would call and literally cry and ask for help. It was me. But they were like, ‘no, you shouldn’t go … What if they arrest you too?’ And I was like, ‘why would they arrest me?’ But I was young, you know, how would I know?,” she says.
She was 20 years old at the time. Three years earlier, she and Sarah had embarked on the dangerous journey from Syria. The two sisters, only a few years apart in age, were inseparable, practically growing up in the water at a Damascus swimming pool with their father as their coach and a shared dream of competing in the Olympic Games. After the war broke out, their parents spent all of their savings to send them to Europe, for safety. One night in August 2015, they found themselves alone and scared on the shores of Turkey. They boarded a boat meant for eight people with 18 others. When the engine failed, the two girls, along with another passenger, jumped into the water and guided the boat to the Greek shores.
It was only the beginning of an incredible adventure. They reached Germany, where they sought out a swimming pool to continue their training and met coach Sven Spannekrebs, who listened to their story and wanted to help. He secured them a room at his swimming club and began training them. Sarah had to quit due to an injury sustained during their journey to Greece but got accepted into university and began her studies. Yusra, who trained exhaustively, kept improving her performance and managed to join the newly formed refugee team at the Olympic Games. Her reputation exploded in Rio, where she became a symbol of hope and optimism in the refugee crisis. She began traveling worldwide, giving speeches, meeting everyone from US President Barack Obama to the pope, and became the youngest ambassador for the UNHCR.
‘The thing I still struggle with most is all those big ships standing there doing absolutely nothing, even though they know people are in danger’
“I have worked a lot with myself in order to deal with and navigate through everything that has happened to me and how it has impacted not just myself, but my sister too and our relationship,” she says.
When Sarah accompanied her to the Olympics, she announced that she would return to Greece to offer others what they didn’t have when starting their journey. However, her arrest and subsequent legal ordeal – which is still ongoing – was traumatic. After being released from prison and returning to Berlin, she decided to quit her studies to focus on humanitarian work. The more her family worried about her behavior, the more distanced she became. She was eventually able to talk about the fact that she had been diagnosed with PTSD – not from the war zone or the perilous journey that nearly cost her life, but from the unjust persecution that led to her imprisonment. “Sarah is taking time to feel herself again. She’s doing better. She’s much better. And we are there for her. I’m grateful and I admire her courage to return to Lesvos as a volunteer, and I realize now that for me, it was impossible to do that trip. It was daunting, it has haunted me,” she says.
Just before her recent trip to Lesvos, she was in Paris, attending an haute couture runway show. “And it took me a while to understand that this is my life: One day I’m gonna to cycle to training and the next day I’m going to meet [former US president Barack] Obama. You know, it doesn’t bother me anymore,” she says.
Her family nonetheless worried about how she would feel returning to the island. “They thought it would be too much for me. I didn’t get why at first, but then when I was on the plane landing on Lesvos, I started crying. And then we were passing places with the car and I was like, oh, this is the church where we slept. Oh, this is where I tried to take a shower pretending to be a European [tourist] … It was sad and hard, but sometimes you have to come back and realize that what you’ve done and what you’re doing in life is actually right. You remind yourself that you are brave and strong. For many years, I struggled with survivor guilt. How did I make it? Many others like me didn’t. The thing that I still struggle with most is all those big ships in the Mediterranean standing there doing absolutely nothing, even though they can hear everything in the sea and know people are in danger. Or refugees being pushed back to their death.”
On Lesvos, she posted on social media that she returned to swim “not out of desperation but for a good cause.” The event was held by Yoga and Sport with Refugees, an organization with a branch on the Greek island that supports refugees through sports. The idea was for 54 volunteer swimmers from around the world, along with asylum-seekers on the island, to swim part of a 12-kilometer route symbolizing the distance between Turkey and Lesvos. Yusra was the first to enter the water. “It was very windy, a lot of waves. It was scary but it was also very emotional, I had goosebumps going into the water,” she says. She swam representing the Yusra Mardini Foundation, which she established to support refugees through sports and education. “Swimming has given me so much in my toughest times. It forever changed my life,” she says.
Last year, she announced that she would stop competitive swimming to focus on her foundation and studies. “I’m still figuring out how to move on from the sport. There is very little knowledge and very little support when you’re done with the sport. Not even your swimmer friends understand what you’re going through. They’re like, ‘oh, okay. You’re fine. You don’t have to train twice a day anymore, you should be happy.’ And it’s difficult because you had this one goal for the longest time in your life; it takes up 90% of your time. And then at one point, you have nothing,” she says.
At the Paris Olympics this summer, she will return as a journalist-presenter for Eurosport, primarily for the refugee team athletes. “It will be very hard to be around the pool while people are competing and I’m not. But I’m really excited and positive about this new chapter,” she says. “I shared my story enough, and it’s time for me to share other people’s stories. And I think the Olympics is an amazing platform to do so,” she says.
The Netflix production was another exciting experience for her. “At the end of the film, we purposely mentioned what happened to Sarah in a way so you think she might still be in jail. So people will search about the case. The first thing people ask me is ‘where is your sister? Is your sister okay? Is she out?’”
Two years ago, she received a scholarship to study film at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. “I do love it, but every semester I’m like, ‘am I going back to university or am I staying in Europe?’ Sometimes it’s just so hard to be in a classroom when you can be in the same room as the biggest CEOs in the world or on a film set. But I think I came to a realization this summer that I don’t want to be someone that has FOMO [fear of missing out] and not be able to finish her studies because of that. Plus, my mom always told us that a woman’s weapon is her studies. She would kill me if I told her I wouldn’t graduate,” she says.
