Few could have failed to feel pride when 18-year-old Emirati swimmer Nada Al Bedwawi carried our flag aloft to lead the 13-strong team into the Olympic stadium in Rio on Friday. Almost all the nationalities represented in the UAE’s workforce would have felt similarly at seeing their own flags held by their country’s finest sportspeople.
But there was a group that did not march into the stadium under their own flag. A group of 10 athletes from across the Middle East and Africa could not represent their countries of origin because they had to flee them due to violence and unrest. Instead they marched into the stadium under the Olympic flag and are competing under the designation "Refugee Olympic Team". This is the first time the International Olympic Committee had allowed such a team, with the exception being made to highlight the unprecedented refugee crisis.
It would be easy to see this as an example of the finest Olympic traditions, showing that sporting prowess alone is what matters and not politics or conflict. Certainly there are compelling and heart-wrenching stories within the Refugee Olympic Team. Yusra Mardini, to take one example, is an 18-year-old Syrian woman who had to swim for her life late last year when the overloaded dinghy taking her and 22 other refugees to Greece began to sink. She and two others jumped into the freezing Aegean Sea and over three hours shepherded the boat to land, saving all on board. By comparison, she ought to find the 200m freestyle event a breeze.
But we ought to see the existence of this remarkable and unlikely team not as a celebration but as a call to action. The Olympic International Committee was right to allow this exception to draw attention to an issue that is affecting countries through the Middle East and Africa, with profound flow-on effects around the world.
Rather than celebrating the bravery of these 10 athletes from Syria, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia, the world must do more to solve the problems that caused these people and 20 million others to flee their homelands. Tens of millions more are internally displaced by conflict.
Nobody should be under any illusion about the intractability of the problems in strife-torn countries, but the estimated audience of 3 billion who saw the opening ceremony should answer the call to do more and go further to ensure that the next Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 will not need this kind of team.
