Refugee team swimmer Yusra Mardini, 18, from Syria with her German coach Sven Spannekrebs at the Olympic swimming venue in Rio de Janeiro, August 4, 2016. Michael Dalder / Reuters.
Refugee team swimmer Yusra Mardini, 18, from Syria with her German coach Sven Spannekrebs at the Olympic swimming venue in Rio de Janeiro, August 4, 2016. Michael Dalder / Reuters.

Syrian refugee swam to freedom - now she’s in the Olympics



LONDON // Less than a year ago, Yusra Mardini had to swim for her life. The overloaded dinghy taking her and 22 other Syrian refugees to Greece started to sink so Yusra, her sister Sara and another woman jumped into the freezing Aegean Sea and for more than three hours, they kept the boat afloat and hauled it through the water until they reached land. Their actions saved 19 other lives as well as their own.

Now Yusra faces another important test of her swimming ability but at stake this time is an Olympic medal. The 18-year-old Syrian is competing in the 100 metres butterfly and 100m freestyle at the Rio Olympic Games as a member of the first ever team of refugee athletes.

She was also chosen to carry the Olympic flag — the banner under which the 10-strong refugee team is competing — at the opening ceremony, an honour she says filled her with “pride, happiness and butterflies in the stomach.”

Back home in Damascus, Yusra was a talented swimmer and professionally backed by the Syrian Olympic Committee. Yet only 11 months ago, Yusra wondered if the sport she loves so much would be the death of her.

In 2012, she represented her country in the FINA /world Swimming Championships in the 200m individual medley, the 200m freestyle and 400m freestyle events.

But as the conflict raged on in Syria, Yusra often found herself training in swimming pools where the roofs had been blown open by bombings. And sometimes it was too dangerous to train at all.

When their home was destroyed, Yusra and Sara left Damascus and headed for Lebanon and then Turkey. From there they boarded a dinghy, along with 20 others — three times as many people as the craft was designed to carry.

“Before you go on the boat, people tell you that you are going to die,” said Sara. “So the first thing you think about when you get on that boat is death. You don’t think of anything else.”

Sara, also a swimmer, said she told Yusra that if their boat capsized during the journey they should just try to save themselves as it would be impossible to help everyone else.

Just 30 minutes after setting off from Turkey, the engine on the boat began to fail and the dinghy began to deflate. Sara, Yusra and the third woman were the only ones who could swim. They knew they could not let the others drown.

“We needed to have less weight on the boat and nobody else besides us could swim,” Sara he recalled. “When I first got into the water my whole body was shaking like it does just before competition. At that very moment I felt that life was bigger than me alone. All the people on that boat were part of me. I felt it was my duty to jump in the water. If I left them I would feel bad about myself for the rest of my life.”

Yusra said, “When I was in the water there was fear. You don’t know whether you are going to live or die. I had one hand with the rope attached to the boat as I moved my two legs and my other arm. After three-and-a-half hours in cold water, your body is almost like ... done. I don’t know if I can describe it.”

One of the men in the boat — a friend of their father — cut off the girls’ trouser legs so they would not be weighed down by clothing.

After two hours of pushing and pulling the dinghy, the sisters were exhausted. But they could not risk falling asleep and drowning.

“It was getting dark and cold, the wind was blowing and I was freezing. My eyes were full of salt water and I could not open them any more, ” said Sara..

They finally made landfall on the Greek island of Lesbos in the middle of night.

After Greece, the sisters travelled through Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria to Germany. They now live in Berlin.

Yusra says she now hates open water but the memory of that epic swim across the Aegean does not haunt her.

“I remember that without swimming, I would not be alive. It was really hard, for everyone and I don’t blame anyone if they cried. But it’s a positive memory for me.”

She hopes her story will inspire others. “When I was swimming for my life, I never would have believed I would be where I am now.” She says she has three wishes. “I wish for borders to be open for refugees, I hope to win an Olympic media and I wish for my hometown to be at peace again.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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India squad

Virat Kohli (captain), Rohit Sharma, Mayank Agarwal, K.L. Rahul, Shreyas Iyer, Manish Pandey, Rishabh Pant, Shivam Dube, Kedar Jadhav, Ravindra Jadeja, Yuzvendra Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav, Deepak Chahar, Mohammed Shami, Shardul Thakur.

Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.

Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.

Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.

“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.

Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.

From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.

Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.

BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.

Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.

Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.

“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.

Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.

“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.

“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”

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