The Refugee Olympic Team will participate in the Paris 2024 Olympics for the third time. It will be made up of athletes recognized by UNHCR, the United Nations agency that deals with refugees, people who for some reason have been forced to flee their country to avoid persecution, and who have found a safe place in another . In Paris there will be thirty-six, 23 men and 13 women, and they will be considered as one of the many participating nations, with their own flag and the possibility of competing for the medal table. The team’s acronym will be EOR, from the French Équipe Olympique des Réfugiés.
Two of these athletes have obtained refugee status in Italy: Hadi Tiranvalipour, who does taekwondo and trains in Rome, and Iman Mahdavi, who will compete in free wrestling and trains in Pioltello, in the Milan hinterland. Both come from Iran, which with fourteen athletes is the most represented country of origin in the refugee team. The other most present countries are Syria and Afghanistan, which will have five athletes each (in total there are eleven countries of origin represented, from three different continents: Asia, Africa and America).
Iman Mahdavi is 29 years old and was born in a province in northern Iran overlooking the Caspian Sea. In Iran, wrestling is one of the most popular and practiced sports: Iranian athletes have won forty-seven Olympic medals in free wrestling and Greco-Roman wrestling. Mahdavi’s father was a wrestler and for this reason he also began to practice this sport, with excellent results, as he won three gold and four silver medals at the Iranian championships.
In 2020 Mahdavi decided to leave the country: “I like being a free person, but in Iran this is not possible”, he says, referring to the repression implemented by the authoritarian and theocratic regime that has led Iran for years. Mahdavi does not practice the Islamic religion, and this in itself was enough to make him an unwelcome person to the authorities. To avoid the risk of endangering his family, he then left the country, arriving on foot in Turkey together with other people. From here he managed to catch a plane that took him to Italy. His mother and his brothers are still in Iran and cannot move from there: he has not seen them for four years.
«When I arrived I was confused, stressed. I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know anyone. I was alone, without family and without friends. My only hope was this sport.” He initially settled in Gallarate (in the province of Varese) and began training alone, on the street, until he found Edoardo Bigliani, a boy from the Seggiano Wrestling Club of Pioltello, on social networks. Mahdavi wrote to him and Bigliani invited him to the gym.
Iman Mahdavi during training with Edoardo Bigliani (Il Post)
Wrestling is a sport with very ancient origins, which was already part of the ancient Olympic Games, those which were held in the city of Olympia, Greece, for over a millennium, from 776 BC to 369 AD. Modern sport today is divided into two disciplines, Greco-Roman wrestling and free wrestling. Both styles take place on a circular area, on top of a mat called a mat. The matches last six minutes, divided into two halves.
To win, you must “pin” your opponent, that is, knock him down and make him touch the ground with his back, or obtain more points than him: points are assigned by the judges for certain attack or defense moves such as holds, bridges and reversals. In Greco-Roman wrestling, wrestlers can only use their arms and attack their opponent only above the waist. Free wrestling, on the other hand, the one practiced by Mahdavi, has much fewer restrictions: you also use your legs and you can catch your opponents even below the waist.
«Iman has exceptional physical gifts. The resistance, the muscular capacity, the speed he expresses are all out of the ordinary: he would certainly succeed well in many other sports”, says Giuseppe Gammarota, who is the president of the Seggiano Fighting Club and one of the people who were fundamental for the inclusion of Mahdavi. Giuseppe and other people from the club, such as his coach Victor Cazacu, helped him to obtain documents, to buy the necessary things to fight and to live, to find work as a bouncer in a nightclub in Milan and to settle in Pioltello, a municipality of approximately 36 thousand inhabitants in the eastern suburbs of Milan.
Mahdavi immediately demonstrated that he was a high-level fighter and won some national competitions. Having obtained refugee status in Italy, he was able to start traveling to Europe to participate in international competitions: in 2023, as an independent athlete, he obtained a twelfth place at the European Championships and an eighteenth at the World Championships, in the 79 kilo category (in Paris instead he will participate in the 74 kilo category). Above all, the International Olympic Committee (or IOC) program for refugee athletes guaranteed him financial support to train until the summer of 2024 and allowed him to join the Refugee Olympic Team. In Paris, it will be difficult for Mahdavi to compete for a medal, although he says he hopes for it.
Iman Mahdavi and Edoardo Bigliani (Il Post)
The first refugee team was created for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics: on that occasion ten athletes participated. There were twenty-nine instead in Tokyo, in the summer of 2021, while in Paris, as mentioned, there will be thirty-six and they will participate in fifteen different sports. Many of them are supported by IOC scholarships for refugee athletes, while sports brand Nike will provide the uniforms. The Refugee Olympic Team has never won a medal, but has only participated in two editions of the Olympics.
Their selection, we read on the official website of the Olympics, was based on various criteria which include sporting performance, countries of origin and also the search for a certain balance between the different sports and gender representation. In addition, obviously, to refugee status. According to UNHCR data, in 2023 there were over 36 million people recognized as refugees around the world and over 110 million people forced to abandon their country due to persecution, war, violence , violations of human rights. For the IOC, these people are represented at the Olympics by the Refugee Olympic Team.
The 36 athletes of the Paris 2024 Refugee Olympic Team
Iman Mahdavi will be the only free wrestling athlete and there will also be a Greco-Roman wrestler, Jamal Valizadeh, Iranian and refugee in France. “We will be proud to represent the Refugee Olympic Team and we will behave as if we were one country: I will cheer for my teammates and they will cheer for me,” says Mahdavi, who knows some of the other Olympic refugees. «Obviously every athlete would like to participate with the flag of their country, but unfortunately this dream was not granted to me. Since I can no longer return to Iran, I would like to compete for Italy one day. When they ask me where I am from, today I answer refugee in Italy».
In free wrestling in the 74 kilo category, Italy already has a high-level athlete, Frank Chamizo (of Cuban origins), who won gold at the World Championships in 2015 and bronze at the Olympics in 2016. However, Chamizo did not qualify for Paris 2024, also due to a very controversial refereeing decision suffered last April in Baku, Azerbaijan. On that occasion, Chamizo also said that they had tried to bribe him into letting a home athlete win. «I trained with Chamizo at times, fighting against him is very difficult, because he is really strong: let’s say that Chamizo is at level ten, Iman at level zero. For me he is a model, and in Baku everyone saw that it wasn’t him who made the mistake, but the referees.” At the women’s level, however, Italy has only one athlete qualified to fight at the Paris Olympics: Aurora Russo, in the 57 kilo category.
Iman Mahdavi and Frank Chamizo in 2022
The gym of the Seggiano Fighting Club is that of the Iqbal Masih school, which decided to close for the day of the end of Ramadan, causing several controversies especially from right-wing politicians. Pioltello is a town with a very heterogeneous composition: residents come from 92 different countries and 36 percent of those under 18 are foreigners. Perhaps also for this reason, Mahdavi says that in Italy he found almost only people who were welcoming and respectful of other cultures, thanks to whom he settled in quickly.
Since it became known that Iman Mahdavi will be at the Olympics, there is great enthusiasm in Pioltello and at the club: “People who used to come to train once, twice a month, lately they come every day.” Over time, he himself became a point of reference for those who go to the gym: «I’m very happy that children are interested in sport after seeing me», he says. In less practiced sports, such as wrestling in Italy, having a close figure to take inspiration from is essential to attract new fans and to grow as a movement.
Iman Mahdavi trains with one of the kids from the Seggiano Fighting Club (Il Post)
At the end of May, however, Iman Mahdavi will leave for Moldova, where he will stay for two months to train in a more competitive context. It will be a very intense period of preparation, to arrive in the best possible conditions in Paris, where the Olympics will begin at the end of July. The men’s free wrestling final in the 74 kilo category will be on Saturday 10 August, the penultimate day of the Games.
2024-05-26 12:58:23
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