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  • 2021-07-26 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Olympic Swimmer Yusra Mardini Flee Syria by Swimming? (en)
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  • In the days before the opening ceremony for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics in summer 2021, a meme emerged online, claiming one Olympian was competing in the sport that literally saved her life while she was fleeing the Syrian civil war: swimming. According to the meme, Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini fled violence in her home country as a teenager. And at one point during that trip, she supposedly swam for three hours, somehow steering a boat carrying an unidentified number of passengers while kicking in the water. The underlying assertion was true. At age 17, Yusra and her sister fled Damascus for Europe in August 2015, reaching Berlin the following month, according to her biographical page on the official website for the Olympics. The page stated: In other words, the viral claim was basically true, though it omitted key details about Yusra's trip on the Aegean Sea going from Turkey to Greece -- namely, she was not the only passenger aboard who decided to jump in after the boat started taking on water; her sister and two unidentified men did as well. Yusra has recalled the treacherous trip in many interviews since entering the international swimming circuit. For example, while speaking to The Associated Press in 2017 (after she made her Olympic debut at the Rio de Janeiro games as member of the first-ever refugee team), she said: My sister jumped in the beginning and then I jumped after her. We didn’t swim normally, but we had a hand on the boat and hand swimming and then kicked. As far as the Tokyo games, Yusra was among 29 Olympians who had previously fled their home countries, received scholarships to train in a new home country (Germany for Yusra), and were selected by the International Olympic Committee to compete on the Refugee Olympic Team. On July 24, the 23-year-old finished the women's 100-meter butterfly third in her heat, behind Azerbaijan athlete Sheikhalizadehkhanghah Mariam, 17, and Sri Lanka swimmer Gaffoor Aniqah, 17. The next day, Margaret MacNeil of Canada won the entire event with a time of 55.59 seconds. (en)
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