Through the Refugee Olympic Team: shining a light on essential humanity
At first, believe it or not, Aram Mahmoud was thinking he was not going to walk in the Tokyo 2020 Opening Ceremony.A member of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, a badminton player, his first match was that next morning. He was there to compete, right? Not just be ceremonial. But then good sense caught up with him. He got dressed up, and there he was, in the Olympic Stadium, “one of the best moments of my life.”And not only that. “Everyone was sending me pictures: ‘Hey, Aram, we saw you at the Opening Ceremony! My family” — he had sent around a link so all could see, even back in Syria — “was watching as well. ‘Hey, Aram, you’re famous!’”
Tokyo marked the second Summer Games to feature a Refugee Olympic Team — the 2020 team with 29 athletes across 12 sports from 13 host National Olympic Committees. They came from a programme supported by the IOC called Olympic Scholarships for Refugee Athletes. The aim, of course: to shine light on the plight of the nearly 100 million people displaced worldwide. Like Aram Mahmoud.
Mahmoud started playing badminton at age 7. In 2015, as a teenager, with civil war raging in Syria, he fled, eventually finding refuge in The Netherlands; he would become a Dutch citizen. At the Tokyo Games, he became the first badminton player on the IOC Refugee Olympic Team.
In the year since Tokyo, while training in hopes of competing at Paris 2024, he has begun studying economics and sport marketing at the Johann Cruyff Institute. Meantime, his family has been able, finally, to join him. Together again in one of the Netherlands’ several planned cities, Almere, founded in 1976: father Mohammad, mother Loudmilla, brother Amour and sister Alisar. Still in Syria: married sister Sanaa.
A year ago in Tokyo? That Saturday morning match after the Opening Ceremony? “To be there — it was the best moment in my sport career,” Aram said.
That he did not win, nor the next match, either — no matter. He was there: “I feel of course privileged to have this opportunity. I saw a lot of friends in Europe getting paid by their associations,” that is, to practice and play. “I see them improving. I am not sad but a little disappointed not having this chance. With this opportunity I have from Olympic Solidarity and this scholarship they give us, I am able to do the same.”
Beyond, what matters, and way more, is what the Games are about at their core, the behind-the-scenes moments in the village at which the world’s athletes can mix and discover their essential humanity, stars and members of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team alike.
Mahmoud and, for instance, the London 2012 and Rio 2016 men’s singles Olympic tennis gold medal-winner, Britain’s Andy Murray, who traded pins and talked for 15 minutes — Murray, injured in Tokyo, having the class and grace to ask how Mahmoud and a friend had done in competition.
Talking shop, too, for another 15 or 20 minutes with the Greek tennis player Stefanos Tsitsipas — about, for instance, the differences in racket strings between badminton and tennis.
A masked-up picture in the dining hall with Novak Djokovic, the Serbian tennis star.
“It was great to be in this environment, and we talked easily,” Mahmoud said.
Then, without meaning to, English assuredly not his first language, Mahmoud nonetheless ventured an eloquent rationale for the Games, why despite everything — its imperfections, all the criticism — the Olympic Games are and will continue to remain vital in our fragile and broken world.
For 17 days in Tokyo, time and again, he said, it was about that essential humanity: “Everyone was equal. No one was above anyone.”