For the refugee team, Olympics are a home and a platform

PARIS – Kids stand in line to see athletes, send them mail, plead for autographs. Heroes are worshipped because they have cut a hard path to great things. But perhaps no one gets messages from places like Adnan Khankan does.

He’s 30, a -100kg judoka, a thickset man of quiet strength, who gets messages from 13-year-olds in refugee camps. “Too much children write to me on Instagram,” he tells The Sunday Times. “We are in refugee camp in Jordan. Maybe 10 years or 20 years later, maybe we are same as you. An Olympic athlete.”

Khankan left Syria in 2015, went to Germany, and competes for the Refugee Olympic Team. Standing at the mixed zone early on a Saturday morning, an interpreter on hand, he is proof of possibility. He lost everything, he says, and now he is here.

So many athletes make rough journeys to a Games but perhaps not quite like this team. Muna Dahouk, originally from Damascus and now in the Netherlands, learnt from her father who was a judo teacher. Then the war came, her father died of a heart attack, her judo club was destroyed and her mother, she says, “was so scared about us and how we will live”. So they left.

Across the world as athletes train, refugees often have to stop playing. For Dahouk it was 10 years. They search for a home and protect their families. Champions rigorously build themselves, says Dahouk, to be here at an Olympics. “We were trying to survive and build a new life.”

On this day the judokas are wearing their gis and a coating of pride. Dahouk, 28, in the -57 kg category, wears an easy cheerfulness. Mahboubeh Barbari Zharfi, 32 and a +78kg competitor, originally from Iran and now in Germany, wears a wide smile.

It is her daughter’s 10th birthday and this single mother proudly says she’s also the mother of the team. Yet later, when she speaks about the six years when she didn’t see her family, she pauses and softly weeps.

Refugees often leave their land regretfully and fearfully. They come to another world and it can be welcoming but it is new. “It wasn’t easy at all,” says Barbari Zharfi. “Arriving in Germany, learning the language, the culture, even the food, learning everything was incredibly difficult. I was in a residence for asylum seekers with my daughter. We had to share one bathroom with loads of people.”

But Barbari Zharfi, pushed into judo by her mother and watching her own child learn to enjoy it, endured. “I want the world to know that you can be a single mother, you can be a refugee, but anything is possible. I think of it as self-magic. If you believe in yourself, then anything is possible.”

According to data from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, there are 37.6 million refugees across the globe. And so these athletes understand the power of their team, who they represent, the voices they have, the ignorance they fight.  

This team, Dahouk believes, has brought attention to refugees. How many there are, the suffering they endure, their life during wars. “Sport is a wonderful platform to break down stereotypes.... we show to the whole world what the refugees can do.”

This is the enviable muscle of sport, this ability to reach across borders and touch presidents and move ordinary folk. It is a vehicle to dismantle stigma. It is a megaphone for justice. “We can send a message for everybody,” Khankan says. He knows there is this fear that refugees are dangerous. “No,” he insists. “We are normal people.” Trying to live but also play.

They speak with fondness of their sport, of its infinite qualities through which their lives have altered and friendships found. “I think,” says Khankan, “it’s a very, very special sport. Judo helped me... in my life when I have problems.” The first thing you learn, he says, is respect. “We start with (a bow of) respect and finish with respect”.

Perhaps they carry a strength from their hard lives to the arena, yet perhaps their sport teaches them a discipline to take on any obstacle. “Everything,” says Dahouk when asked what she likes about judo. “Responsibility. Respect. How you have to be stronger. How you have to face, if one day you have to face a hard life. Because of judo maybe I survived.”

Sport is more substantial than mere medals and anthems. First, it is a human right and it is why this team at the Olympics matters. And as I leave the mixed zone on this instructive morning, one simple story stays with me. I’d asked Khankan of his best moment at the Games and often athletes speak of a victory or of an athlete they admire who they took a selfie with. But his answer is different.

“I think for me, when I see the Olympic tatami in the arena on the first day.”

The tatami is the mat they fight on and maybe it’s a symbol of a journey. As a 10-year-old, a coach in Syria told Khankan he was talented and that he should go to the Olympics.

“I said, ‘what do you mean? What is Olympics’?”

And now here he is in Paris. On an Olympic tatami. Once look where the boy was. Now see where the man has come.