Syrian girl’s swim to freedom
In 2015, Yusra Mardini almost drowned while fleeing the civil war in Syria. She survived thanks to her swimming skills and, just a year later, competed at the Rio Olympics. Now Hollywood wants to tell her story
ALMOST every morning a Syrian girl with a winning gap-toothed smile takes a deep breath and dives into an Olympicsize swimming pool on the outskirts of Berlin in Germany. As she rips through the water with a butterfly stroke honed from a lifetime of swimming, Yusra Mardini never forgets how close she came to drowning in the Mediterranean Sea as she fled the civil war in Syria.
When the motor on their dangerously overcrowded boat stalled off the coast of Turkey, she and her elder sister, Sara, swam for more than three hours in the churning, frigid sea, steering the boat towards the Greek islands. They helped save not only their own lives but those of 18 other refugees.
“I thought it would be a real shame if I drowned in the sea because I’m a swimmer,” Yusra said with typical nonchalance after her story became known.
A swimmer she is. As she dives again into the water, her babyish face hidden behind goggles, her shoulder-length dark-brown hair tucked under a white cap, Yusra uses the memory of that traumatic journey and the bloody civil war from which she escaped to power her seemingly limitless dreams.
In the two and a half years since she arrived in Europe, Yusra – pronounced “eesra” – has competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics. She’s met the pope and former American president Barack Obama. She’s given speeches at the United Nations and to the World Economic Forum in Davos. She’s been appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations. She’s written a memoir, Butterfly, and a Hollywood feature film about her is now in the works.
“Yes, we’re refugees, but we’re normal human beings, just like you,” Yusra, who’s just turned 20, tells me she wants people to know.
“We think about our futures. We care about our kids. We’re doctors and engineers and teachers. We’re educated, but we just don’t have the chance to continue our normal lives because of war.”
As lofty as her achievements have been since she fled Syria, her focus is now back on swimming. She knows she must get her lap times much lower to have a chance of competing in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
“If I’m going to be realistic,” says Yusra, who at 1,65m is small for a swimmer, “I know it will be really good if I’m in the top 20 or 40 in the world. But I’m not going to take that as an answer, so I’m putting everything I can into this until the next Olympics.”
YUSRA was born into a family of swimmers. Her father, Ezzat, was a swimming coach at a sports complex in Damascus that was also home to the Syrian Olympic Committee. When Yusra was just four, Ezzat threw her into the pool, where a large portrait of President Bashar al-Assad adorned one wall.
“I have no memories without the pool,” Yusra tells me, tucking into a plate of pasta in the canteen of the Olympic Park after she finished her two-hour morning training.
Ezzat was a hard taskmaster and both Yusra and Sara, who’s three years older, were soon training three times a week and taking part in competitions.
One of Yusra’s earliest memories is of her father making them watch American superstar Michael Phelps win the 100m butterfly at the 2004 Athens Olympics. This was when she decided she too wanted to be an Olympic champion.
In those times, life in Syria was good for a family like the Mardinis. They weren’t wealthy but Yusra’s mother, Mervat, also worked – as a physiotherapist – and the family, which by then included their youngest sister, Shahed, lived in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus. The civil war began in March 2011. “It was terrifying. We didn’t go out,” Yusra says.
“Sometimes I had to stay under the table or sleep in a bed with my whole family, because the war was going on outside and we could hear shooting and tanks.
“Sometimes we wanted to go out to see friends but my mom was telling me, ‘No, you must stay home.’ I was, like, ‘Mom, sorry, but some of my friends died in their homes, so I think if I’m going to die, I’m going to die wherever I am.’ ”
But the war became impossible to ignore. In August 2012 savage fighting broke out in Daraya as the government tried to wrest control of the suburb from rebels. An estimated 1 000 people were killed in three days.
The noise of gunfire, mortars and
bombs was constant. Families were torn apart; people disappeared.
While Yusra was at a swimming competition in Russia with the Syrian national team her family had to flee their home. “All I had was the bag I went to Russia with,” Yusra recalls. “I wish I could’ve taken some pictures of me when I was young and the really nice medals I won for swimming. They were really precious to me.”
Their home destroyed, the Mardinis were forced to move every few months to increasingly expensive flats in the governmentcontrolled areas of Damascus. To earn more money, Ezzat took a job as a swimming coach in Jordan.
Swimming offered respite, but Yusra’s training was often disrupted and she started to drift away from the discipline of the pool.
She lost count of the times she came close to death. After a training session one evening, a mortar slammed into the ground just in front of where she and Sara were walking, blowing out the front of a hotel where swimmers and athletes often stayed.
“Like in a Hollywood movie, the glass started flying out,” she says. “I was crying. If we’d been there one minute before we would’ve been cut up by the glass. We knew people who died in the hotel.”
Most shocking was when Yusra was swimming and a rocket-propelled grenade smashed through the roof and landed, unexploded, in the bottom of the pool.
IT’S hard not to be impressed by Yusra Mardini. She’s amusing and pretty, with the matter-of-fact nonchalance of a girl barely out of her teens, talking about profound matters of life and death while checking her Facebook page, which has more than 100 000 followers.
As the war dragged on she realised that if she was to continue swimming competitively she needed to leave Syria for Europe, as some of her friends had done.
At first Yusra’s parents refused even to consider the idea. But when Yusra and Sara discovered that one of their father’s cousins was planning to make a trip to Germany, they were finally able to persuade their parents to let them go.
Barely a month later, on 12 August 2015, they boarded a flight to Istanbul in Turkey.
They were among the more than one million refugees that crossed the Mediterranean to Europe that year, according to the International Organisation for Migrants. The largest number – 214 266 – came from Syria. A total of 3 771 died in the crossing.
But Yusra and Sara were so desperate for a new life they were willing to take their chances.
After contacting a smuggler in Istanbul, they and their relatives and a group of other refugees were driven to a forest near Izmir, on the western Turkish coast. Hundreds of refugees were waiting in the sweltering summer heat, corralled by gangs of armed smugglers.
The refugees each had to pay $1 500 (then about R19 800) for the roughly 10km journey to the Greek island of Lesbos. Yusra and Sara’s trip was financed with family savings.
They waited four days, with almost no food and little water. At night, police helicopters hovered ominously overhead.
Their group was shocked when they saw their boat: an inflatable dinghy meant for six people, with a small outboard motor. There would be 20 of them, including an Iraqi woman with a baby and two young children, a Somali woman and five Sudanese men.
The boat set off around 7pm, so weighed down that water filled up the bottom with every wave. After 15 minutes the engine stopped. They tried scooping the water out but, as the dinghy spun listlessly, waves threatened to capsize it.
They used their cellphones to call the Greek and Turkish coastguards, but neither would come to save them. In desperation they even phoned their families. People started to pray.
One man jumped into the sea so the boat would sit higher in the water. Sara and Yusra, among the only ones who could swim, also jumped in, fully clothed, and used a rope to help pull the boat towards Lesbos.
“We used our legs and one arm each – we held the rope with the other and kicked and kicked. Waves kept coming and hitting me in the eye,” she says.
“That was the hardest part – the stinging of the saltwater. But what were we going to do? Let everyone drown?” Yusra later recalled.
The sisters swam with the boat in tow for more than three hours. Then, overwhelmed with cold and exhaustion, they clambered back aboard. Miraculously, as they lay recovering, the engine spluttered back into life and they moved quickly towards the Greek island, landing about 20 minutes later.
If the boat trip was traumatic, the rest of their 25-day journey through Europe, along a trail being taken by hundreds of thousands of other refugees that summer, was humiliating.
“The restaurants on Lesbos wouldn’t give us anything – food or water,” Yusra says. “We offered them $500 (then about R6 600) just for water or juice but they said they weren’t allowed to sell to us.”
The authorities were overwhelmed by
tens of thousands of refugees. Yusra and Sara queued for two days for a temporary residence permit, which allowed them to buy a ticket on a ferry to the mainland.
Over the following days, sometimes walking, sometimes taking buses provided by smugglers for hundreds of euros, they travelled through Macedonia and Serbia to Budapest. When they caught a train to the Hungarian border, they were thrown off by police.
“You feel as if you’re not human,” Yusra recalls. “You feel like you’re poor, you have no country, you’re no one.”
Eventually they arrived in Austria, welcomed by teams of volunteers. Trains were provided to take them to Berlin.
On 7 September they finally arrived at a large refugee camp in the west of Berlin where hundreds of others were being sheltered. Yusra and Sara had each spent more than $5 400 (more than R72 000) on the trip – on flights and trains and to pay smugglers at various points along the way.
Much of their first freezing Berlin winter was spent queuing, as they fulfilled the arduous German bureaucratic formalities. As many as 5 000 refugees sometimes queued through the night.
A volunteer at the refugee camp told her there was a well-known swimming programme at Wasserfreunde Spandau, part of the nearby Olympic Park complex.
The club agreed to let Yusra and Sara try out. “Technically, they were really good,” says Sven Spannekrebs, a coach at the centre. “But Yusra’s aerobic level was very bad and she’d lost her feeling for the water.” The club let the sisters train and offered them accommodation, so they were able to move out of the refugee camp.
Psychologically, Yusra and Sara appeared to be in much better shape than Spannekrebs had expected.
“They seemed really strong and they joked all the time,” he recalls. “There were times when they were upset because of news from Syria but mainly Yusra was just happy she could swim.”
Sara had long-standing problems with her shoulders and gradually pulled out of full-time training. Yusra found it difficult at first, because she had to train with much younger swimmers. But the club gave the sisters a community and German friends they felt comfortable with.
“Her progress has been fascinating,” Spannekrebs says. “It’s better than I ever saw for someone who’d left swimming.”
The initial plan was for Yusra to aim for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, but word began to seep out that the International Olympic Committee was thinking for the first time about having a refugee team, at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Although Yusra’s dream had always been to compete at the Olympics, she was torn. “I thought, ‘If I’m with the refugee team, people are going to feel pity for me’ ,” she says. “Then I realised that, ‘Why shouldn’t I show people that I can swim at a huge event?’ I have swum my whole life. I realised it was an opportunity that wouldn’t come to a lot of people.”
Yusra had no illusions that she’d win a medal. Although she was knocked out in the second round she found it an amazing experience to be at the Games.
“I felt so proud to be representing refugees, representing myself, meeting up with the refugee team.”
She even saw her childhood idol, Michael Phelps, although she didn’t get to meet him. “One day,” she says.
As the poster girl for the Olympic refugee team, Yusra became an international celebrity – just a year after she’d fled Syria and nearly died in the Mediterranean. She was natural, funny and heartfelt, and had an incredible story to tell. She became as powerful a magnet for the world’s media as Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai had been.
Although she’s found the attention often overwhelming, Yusra takes it in her stride, especially now that the rest of her family have joined her in Berlin. She lives in a flat near the Olympic Park with her mother and two sisters and her father lives nearby.
Yusra has become comfortable meeting world leaders such as Barack Obama (“really chilled”) and the pope (“very calm”). She’s proud to be the youngest goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency. When she speaks at conferences such as Davos in Switzerland, she does so without notes.
“The secret of Yusra’s success is that she’s 100% authentic,” says Marc Heinkelein, her manager. “Of course, there are times when she’s sad and she cries at home because of the news from Syria, but she’s a very positive person with tremendous energy and will.”
With Hollywood clamouring, Heinkelein negotiated the deal to make a film from her story. It will be directed by Stephen Daldry, the Oscar-winning director of Billy Elliot and The Hours.
But the focus remains on her training, which is at least 30 hours a week.
It’s not clear which country Yusra might represent at the Tokyo Olympics. She doesn’t yet have German nationality and it will be difficult for her to get into the very competitive German team.
She might be able to swim for Syria, but that’s fraught with political complications. And at the moment there’s no indication that the IOC will repeat the experiment of allowing a refugee team at the next Olympics.
“I just want to be at the Olympics no matter what the flag is,” Yusra says. “I’m Syrian in my heart, in my mind, in my soul, but I’m living in Germany now, so I respect that, and I was at the last Olympics with the refugee team, which means so much to me.
“Whichever flag, I know that I’ll be representing millions of people around the world.”
‘You feel as if you’re not human. You have no country, you’re no one’