By Miguel Rapetti
May 2, 2024, 9:53 PM EDT
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially presented this Thursday the 36 athletes who will join under the refugee system to participate in the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in the month of August, and who will have three Hispanics in his credit.
Since Rio 2016, the refugee team has joined together to compete with those athletes who, for one reason or another, cannot represent their countries of birth and this year will have the particularity that they will have their own Olympic emblem, which is formed by a heart surrounded by several arrows.
The symbol seeks to represent that although each member of the refugee team has their own story, they all share a similar experience of life.
Part of them are the three Hispanics who make up the team: the Venezuelan Edilio Centeno Nieves, as well as the Cubans Dayán Jorge Enrique and Ramiro Mora, who will try to win a medal in Olympic shooting, canoeing and weightlifting respectively.
In addition to the three Latin American athletes, 15 are of Iranian origin, five were born in Syria and four come from Afghanistan, while the rest are from other conflict zones in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, South Sudan, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo.
Many of them have been welcomed as refugees in European countries, such as Germany or the United Kingdom, while others reside in Mexico, Israel or Canada, among other places, also alternating with the countries where they carry out their training.
The athletes have been selected through an IOC scholarship program for people with refugee status verified by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in order to provide sports training to members of this group who are forced to flee their country due to crises and conflicts.
For the composition of the team, the IOC has also taken into account other criteria such as the sporting performance of each athlete, gender equality and a balanced representation of the countries of origin.
Unlike the first Rio 2016 Olympic refugee team, which only competed in three sports (athletics, swimming and judo), this year’s athletes will participate in a wide variety of disciplines.
The Afghan Manizha Talash, who currently resides in Madrid, will be the first refugee athlete to compete in the discipline of “breakdance”, one of the six categories that will debut in the next Olympic Games along with climbing, surfing or skateboarding.
As has been customary since Rio 2016 and also in Tokyo 2020, the refugee delegation is expected to parade during the inauguration like the rest of the nations that obtained their places.
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