Yusra Mardini: ‘I’m a symbol of hope’

When Yusra Mardini swam across the Aegean Sea to flee Syria in 2015, global mass displacement was at a record high of 65.3 million people. There had been a huge influx of refugees to Europe that year – the highest figures since the second world war. These numbers have since increased: at last count, the global number of displaced people had reached 108.4 million. 

This year has seen the Turkey-Syria earthquakes, which reduced whole towns to rubble. Then came earthquakes in Afghanistan and Morocco. The Russo-Ukrainian war has displaced around 14 per cent of Ukraine’s population, and the Israel-Hamas war an estimated 70 per cent of Gaza’s. 

“It’s been a horrible year,” says Mardini, speaking from her dorm room at the University of Southern California. Until war broke out in 2011, the 25-year-old had lived peacefully in Damascus. She went out with friends, took the bus to school and swam competitively. The decision to flee Syria came shortly after a bomb hit a pool in which Mardini was training.

Mardini’s journey to Germany, which she describes as her “second home”, is now familiar to millions. While travelling across the eight-mile stretch of water between Turkey and Greece in 2015, Mardini was forced to dive overboard to pull a faulty motor boat to shore alongside her sister, Sara, and two other passengers. The swim lasted more than three hours, and all 20 refugees survived. Upon arriving in Germany, Mardini continued her swimming training, eventually participating in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics as part of the Refugee Team. Sara stopped swimming due to injury and focused on philanthropic work. Their parents and younger sister, Shahed, have since settled in Berlin.  

It felt like I’d received this huge role that I didn’t sign up for

The event projected the sisters into the public’s attention. Both featured in this year’s Time 100 list, and their story was dramatised in The Swimmers, Sally El Hosaini’s film, which was distributed on Netflix. Mardini’s involvement in the production led to her film and TV production degree at USC, where she lives as a regular student. Her dorm room is littered with all the usual paraphernalia: books, posters, a pile of clothes. Her Instagram posts find her posing in regulation student get-ups. Recently she’s enjoyed watching the films Fight Club and Wanted. “I realised I am now a professional because I immediately run to see who the director and producer is,” she says. 

Mardini is in a period of transition. She no longer relates to the “athlete side” of herself. She last swam competitively in June 2022. “I decided to be smart,” she says. “I asked myself, ‘Will you win the gold medal?’ No. OK, it’s time to move on.” Nor is she completely comfortable with her new life in the spotlight. “It felt like I’d received this huge role that I didn’t sign up for,” she says in her easy, chatty manner. “It took me a while to understand that I didn’t miss out on anything, and not being a normal teenager is fine.”

Working through these contradictions has allowed Mardini to settle on how she sees her future. “I realised I can be who I am doing what I love the most, which is being a symbol of hope.” In June, she launched the Yusra Mardini Foundation, which aims to advance access to sports and education for refugee communities. “Sport and education brought me here – I’m forever thankful for that.”

Among the Foundation’s first projects is a collaboration with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where Mardini has been a goodwill ambassador since 2017. Details will revolve around giving children in camps sports lessons. “When I got to Germany, the first thing I did was swim. That was the only thing that felt like home,” she says. “Sport can give you relief – it’s therapy.” The project is planned to roll out in 2024. 

One of the biggest problems faced by refugees today is the disparity in support services around the world. Mardini’s Foundation is less about providing emergency care and more about providing an environment that might spark the imagination; developing skills and improving access to education can provide a lifeline that is applicable in any context. “Everyone is always thinking about what refugees immediately need – food, security and medical aid,” says Mardini. “That’s how I thought, ‘What if I give them sport?’” 

“Education is an investment that no one can take away from you – it’s yours to have,” says Summia Tora, founder of Dosti Network, which launched after the fall of the Afghan government in 2021. Much like Mardini, Tora is driven by her experiences as a refugee. “It is a true form of empowerment because you are not creating a system of reliance or this concept that refugees need to be saved,” says Tora, who has two Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford. The emphasis is on “unlocking potential” and giving people the “ability to change their own situation”.  

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UNHCR estimates that the number of forcibly displaced or stateless people will rise to 117.2 million by the end of 2023. While Mardini is “smart enough to understand that, even if there were no war refugees, there will be climate-change refugees”, she still has a schoolgirl’s naivety about how to fix the world. “I would put the leaders in the desert, let them fight and keep the civilians safe,” she says at one point. “But that’s not the world, unfortunately.”

The Foundation operates between the US and Germany, with a small team – all people who have had experience working with refugees – based in both countries. The early stages of the Foundation – legal talks began in early 2022 – were funded solely through Mardini’s work as a keynote speaker (her most recent gig was at the Global Citizen Forum earlier in December). Extra support now comes from fundraising and donations. The Foundation’s first benefactor was Sven Spannekrebs, the coach who helped Mardini train for the Olympics. The largest sum has come from a Sheikha in the Middle East, a fan of The Swimmers. 

Mardini also needs people on the ground, helping out at camps and providing coaching when her sports programmes get going. An obvious choice would be Sara, 28, who has experience both as a coach and working for NGOs. “She’s volunteered a few times and knows about foundations a little bit more than I do,” says Mardini. In 2018, Sara was charged with various offences at a time when she was helping refugees and migrants while providing humanitarian work on Lesbos, the Greek island she’d arrived at three years earlier. A Greek court dropped the charges in January this year, but a recent prosecution appeal looms heavily.

If Mardini is concerned by the pressures of her pedestal, she doesn’t show it. She sees the Foundation as some kind of civic duty. “Representing millions [of refugees] around the world” is her “responsibility”. “Sometimes you’re overwhelmed; sometimes you have a normal day,” she says. This attitude is not unusual for someone in Mardini’s position. Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai has spoken of the “extent of [her] privilege” in regards to her UK education. Dosti Network’s Tora says her life “can only be rewarding” if she does “as much as [she] can with the position [she is] in today”.

“It’s not only a privilege, but also a duty,” says Iranian-American actress Sepideh Moafi. “I cannot otherwise make sense of my own fortune.” Moafi was born in a German refugee camp and later settled in the US; her parents fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Today she is an advocate for refugee rights and an ambassador for the International Rescue Committee. “Yusra means humanity,” says Moafi. “She is a symbol of courage, selflessness and perseverance. To the public, she is a hero – someone who has overcome unimaginable hardship and yet gives all of herself to help others.”

Yusra means humanity – she is a symbol of courage

The trouble with heroes is that they often let us down; we expect more from them than is humanly possible. “All of this takes longer than people think,” says Angela Kail, director of consulting at charity think-tank NPC. “You see a lot of foundations set up with a big hoo-ha, but they’re hardly giving away anything.” This is particularly pressing for fundraising foundations: maintaining a strong profile and raising money is critical, all of which takes time away from the charity. Adds Kail: “You need to keep the pace up in order to make sure you are actually giving money away. Will people be expecting [Mardini] to give more because they imagine she’s richer than she is? Will they be expecting her to do more than she can do in a world with finite attention spans?”

Heroes are also under more scrutiny from the media. Kail points to the recently disgraced Captain Tom Foundation: the charity was set up in memory of a 99-year-old who raised £38.9mn for NHS Charities Together, but it has since become subject of a statutory inquiry. Could Mardini be accused of cashing in on her celebrity? “There are some people who will always view you as trying to get some sort of halo for yourself,” says Kail. In reality, however, public giving is always more favourable than private support. It encourages other people to give, while philanthropists with a platform can “push the conversation in places where people otherwise wouldn’t bother to listen”.

Mardini is using her position to her advantage. Her work as a model – she’s walked for Casablanca and Boss – is highlighting the importance of diversity in the fashion industry. In her role as a speaker, meanwhile, she advocates for refugees around the world. But these are things that need to be tightly moderated. Confusion arises when a founder talks about issues that are adjacent to their charity, but not the focus. “Where is the line?” asks Kail. “When are you speaking personally and when are you speaking on behalf of the charity? It can become very blurred.”

Mardini wants to be “authentic and honest”. “Sometimes you have to let people know what you want,” she says simply. She wants to be seen as more than just a refugee. “I am portrayed as the Syrian refugee who came, crossed, almost died during her journey and then went to the Olympics? That’s it? I’m like, ‘No’.” 

Ultimately, Mardini wants to set up her own clothing label. She’s been warned it’s one of the “hardest things” to do. Mardini is unfazed. She wants to continue studying, modelling and speaking – anything as long as it “[makes] an impact”. She adds: “I want to be like, ‘Hey, everything happened in my life. Still, here I am doing so many things.’”

A fashion label would allow Mardini to inject extra funds into her Foundation, as well as make room for potential collaborations. She already has a partnership with Swiss watch brand Oris; the company will help support the upcoming sports project with UNHCR. “Yusra’s refusal to be classified solely as a refugee is a testament to her fierce independence and ambition,” says Rolf Studer, the brand’s co-CEO.

The question emerges again: where is Mardini in all of this? “People are a little bit confused,” she admits. “I’m a speaker. I have a foundation. I’ve been an Olympic swimmer. I want to model; I want to act. I study film and TV production. It’s just exploring what I want in life right now.”