'Last thing I saw was that half of Syria was liberated'

Former Olympic swimmer Yusra Mardini speaks candidly to Jack Rathborn about her country's future after the dramatic removal of the dictator Bashar al-Assad earlier this month

- Jack Rathborn

Yusra Mardini stepped on a plane back to Germany for the holidays overwhelmed by emotion. News had just filtered through from Syria of the overthrow of the country's longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Joy and relief were met with hesitation, a reluctance to truly celebrate. The former Olympic swimmer for the Refugee Olympic Team (ROT) would sit with her thoughts for the next 10 hours, unable to access the internet to truly comprehend the scale of such a historic moment.

Now living in Los Angeles, it has been almost 10 years since Mardini survived a treacherous crossing of the Aegean Sea in a rubber dinghy alongside her sister Sara, successfully escaping her war-torn country. Mardini’s swimming background enabled her to survive.

The boat’s motor began to fail just 30 minutes after departing Turkey and with 20 people crammed inside a space designed for just six, Mardini and her sister opted to sacrifice their own safety. Leaping into the open water, they swam for three hours to lessen the prospect of the boat capsizing before finally reaching Lesbos, Greece.

From bombs landing around her home in Darayya on the outskirts of Damascus, her miraculous journey of resolve ended with her eventually reaching Germany in the hope of a better life. That quickly materialised in the shape of two appearances at the Olympics, in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. Her story would later be told in the Netflix film The Swimmers.

“The last thing I saw before flying was that half of Syria was liberated,” Mardini tells The Independent, having quickly forgotten about her exams at the University of Southern California before attending this month’s short course World Swimming Championships in Budapest.