AS GOOD AS GOLD

How Yusra Mardini’s escape from war-torn Syria led her to the Olympics, taught her to embrace the word ‘refugee’, and changed her concept of what winning really means

- Vaishali Dinakaran

When Yusra Mardini utters these words, the smile leaves her face for the first time during our conversation. Until then, the 22-year-old has oscillated between personable and vivacious. Despite the fact that we’re separated by a screen—she’s speaking to me via video call from her home in Hamburg, Germany—her energy has the ability to make me forget that we’re not in the same room. No answer is delivered without a few cheerful and enthusiastic gestures. And there’s an incredible sense of clarity and conviction in everything she says—her words carry a weight of wisdom unusual for someone so young. It’s only in that one moment devoid of conviviality that I’m reminded of just how harrowing her life had been a few years ago.

“At the back of my mind, I knew that I could swim it. But the other people on the boat couldn’t,” Mardini says, thinking back six years.

In August 2015, Yusra and her older sister Sarah were in a crowded rubber boat that was cutting through the treacherous waters between Turkey and Greece. It was just one leg of the perilous journey from their hometown of Damascus, Syria—by then ravaged by a multisided civil war—to Germany, where they hoped to seek refuge. When the boat’s engine suddenly gave up, and the possibility of capsizing seemed real, it became clear to both girls that they had to try swimming. It was the only way to ensure the safety of the 18 other passengers on board.