Three Members of the Olympic Refugee Team Will Soon Call Canada Home

Paulo Amotun Lokoro, right, and Yiech Pur Biel, both middle-distance runners from South Sudan, in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Credit…James Hill for The New York Times

At this year’s Olympics, Team Canada is 371 athletes-strong, the country’s largest team to compete since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

And on their trips back home, the 2020 Tokyo cohort will increase by three.

That’s because three middle-distance runners from the International Olympic Committee Refugee Team are coming to Canada.

Paulo Amotun Lokoro, Rose Lokonyen Nathike and James Nyak Chiengjiek, track and field athletes originally from South Sudan, will be headed to Ontario after the Games thanks to a new athletic scholarship. It’s offered through the World University Service of Canada (WUSC), a nonprofit organization that has connected 2,100 refugees to educational opportunities here over the past four decades.

The athletes will join another 150 refugee students selected from roughly 5,000 applicants to land at one of 80 participating institutions this fall. The three athletes will study at Sheridan College in Oakville, west of Toronto, which is partnering with WUSC and refugee agencies at the United Nations to offer the program.

“It’s powerful, it’s transformative,” Katharine Im-Jenkins, chief programs officer at WUSC, told me, with a caveat. “It’s a drop in the bucket, and the scale of the challenge of forcibly displaced people is 82 million this year, and so we’re really focused on not only those three, but really making that a model and making that bigger.”

Although the pandemic has made usual travel and paperwork for the refugee students more complicated, Ms. Im-Jenkins said she was encouraged that the program that emerged from this year’s Olympics would attract different profiles of refugees. She also hopes it will entice Canadians to “get excited and learn more about refugee issues, and to step up and do what they can in their communities to help.”

Mr. Chiengjiek, who is competing in the 800-meter race in Tokyo, his second Olympics, evaded being forcibly recruited among child soldiers in South Sudan by fleeing to Kenya in 2002, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. There, at Kakuma Refugee Camp, he trained in long-distance running and was later scouted onto the Olympic Committee’s new refugee team, first appearing at the 2016 Games.

His story reminds me of James Madhier, who I spoke to in 2017 when he was pursuing an undergraduate degree in peace, conflict and justice studies at the University of Toronto. He also ended up at Kakuma camp after returning from a child soldier demobilization and rehabilitation program in Sudan, about three hours away from his hometown.

Though Mr. Madhier did not count himself among the boys needing rehabilitation, he went there because he thought the place could offer him an education. Instead, many of the children ended up contracting illnesses, being killed or traumatized, with some officially joining militia groups, he said.

Mr. Madhier’s desire for an education eventually led him to Kenya, where the list of students accepted to WUSC is posted for all to see at the camp.

Something he told me about waiting for the list — and his general view on overcoming hardship — has resonated: “I was nervous, but life has taught me over the years to avoid any heartbreaks, to avoid any hopelessness, you’ve got to create options, even where there are none,” he said. “Even if the option that you will create for yourself is how you will accept the loss.”

This year, we’re seeing athletes boldly create those options for themselves that go beyond a podium moment — from Simone Biles withdrawing from the competition over mental health concerns, to German gymnasts and the Norwegian women’s beach handball team making a statement against “sexualization” in athletics, to the very existence of the refugee team at Tokyo.

And soon, three of them will call Canada home.

Trans Canada

• Don’t miss the Saturday Profile of Kisha Supernant, an Indigenous archaeologist whose work has put her on the forefront of the continuing search for unmarked graves of residential school children. “The past few months have been very, very intense,” Professor Supernant told my colleague, Ian Austen. “I really feel strongly that this is a calling.”

• Could these spongelike structures discovered in Canada’s Northwest Territories be the oldest animal fossils ever found? Or are they just squiggles? A scientific article published in the Nature journal on Wednesday pits an Ontario geologist’s research against the critics.

• A Canadian-born psychologist whose behavioral studies and social cognitive theories transformed American psychology, Albert Bandura, died on Monday at the age of 95. Dr. Bandura was raised in Alberta and pursued his graduate studies in the United States, completing landmark laboratory studies in aggression at Stanford University in the early 1960s

• Margaret Mac Neil won the 100-meter butterfly in Tokyo, Canada’s first gold medal. The 21-year-old was not wearing contact lenses or prescription goggles, so it took her a moment longer to read the scoreboard before she realized she won, according to an interview with Mac Neil published by the Canadian Olympic Committee. The video of her delayed reaction to winning, and delight, was widely shared on Twitter.

SUMMER GAME TIME

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Vjosa Isai joined The New York Times as a Canada news assistant in June. Follow her on Twitter at @lavjosa.

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