Yusra and Sarah Mardini, the Syrian sisters who inspired Netflix’s Swimmers: from Olympic glory to a possible prison sentence

Run 2015. Yusra and Sarah Mardini they push arm by arm, kick by kick, a boat in the middle of the Aegean Sea. They came from fulfilling the odyssey of fleeing the war in Syria which has been going on for eleven years. An eternal martyrdom that at first seemed far away, that typical sense of survival, “it won’t happen to me”, until a bomb destroyed his house. They arrived in Lebanon and then Turkey, where a human smuggler set them up to smuggle them into Greece. They had to spend the night hidden in a forest together with Somali, Syrian and Iranian refugees… Yusra is 18 and her sister Sarah is 21.

The goal is to reach Berlin, but for this they must first cross that puddle full of islets where Greek mythology marks the birth of some Olympic deities, including Triton, messenger of the seas, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. In the morning the girls come to the coast. The noise of the semi-rigid engine is music in the midst of that martyrdom. Men and some women in tunics come up. Even children who can’t swim. With those two, they add up to 20.

The small boat takes time to leave. The dealer pulls the starter rope over and over again. The boat is overflowing, with the heaviest weight behind it and the nose up, as if pointing to the sky. The green, blue-tinged waters of the Aegean Sea don’t exactly lead to paradise. The boat is overflowing and doesn’t seem to hold up for the ride.

The barge sinks from the weight. I can not stand it.

A demanding father and a difficult decision

Ezza MardiniYusra’s father, Sarah and the youngest, Shaed, was a kind of Richard Williams, demanding at best, He claimed to be the first Syrian father in history with three daughters who swam in the Olympics. He was the coach of the Damascus swim team. And the girls, their big project. We could have your saySyrian dream”.

“Two weeks ago, at the national championships, Yusra broke her personal best in the 100m butterfly. Sarah is dedicated and a leader like his father, but Yusra is dedicated, strong and persevering. it is a rock”, says his character in swimmers, the sensational Netflix film that tells the story of his daughters. There was his Serena.

But the civil war is suffocated. And the Olympic dream has become more and more distant. When the protests against President Bashar al-Assad that led to the revolution began, Yusra was in seventh grade. It was 2011. “I kept swimming and going to school, trying to live like a normal girl,” she explains.

In 2012, the Battle of Daraya took place between rebels and al-Assad’s forces. The city became a theater of war: “Everything was different from there: the tanks were everywhere, the cables hung from the posts…”.

The sisters, in their adolescence, they wanted to leave Damascus, a city that woke and went to bed to the sound of bombing. They watched their friends die, the bullets coming closer and closer. That’s how they decided to bring their father an idea: they wanted to cross the sea on a refugee ship, looking for a new life. Once he arrived in Germany, the tickets would be legalized and sent to the rest of the family. But, for this, they had to cross the Aegean, without the protection of their overprotective father.

The day a bomb destroyed the house, Ezzat realized that his daughters’ plan was his only chance, not for Olympic gold, but for a life away from bombing. And she accepted the trip.

Yusra and Sarah, a movie story

Seen from above, the boat that carries Sarah and Yusra across the Aegean Sea is a nut in the ocean. The same would be if it were a warship. Or a cruise. But this is seriously small. Imagine one of those rubber bands that are used for fishing or launching a water skier. But this one carries 20 refugees. It’s overflowing, it starts to sink and the motor breaks down.

In the first half of 2021 more than a thousand migrants had died at sea trying to reach Europe. But by the end of the year that figure had tripled to a dismal record of three thousand refugees who did not reach the other shore, with their bodies washed ashore or simply disappeared. That 2015 was 800. Yusra, Sarah, and their fellow travelers seemed to be on their way to joining that anonymous list.

When death is imminent, panic breaks out on the ship. Prayers are heard in several languages ​​and dialects. Muslim predominates. The tire is broken and the engine won’t start. The weight begins to be the great enemy of the semi-rigid, which fills up with water.

To do. Swim. The girls are two athletes, trained by an obsessive father who has prepared them to get to the Olympic Games and not jump off a boat to save their lives. But if they jump in, they know if they go in the right direction, they’ll live to tell the tale. What are they doing? Quite the opposite.

Sarah is the tour guide. Even the one in charge of taking care of his sister. First of all, give the order to throw away backpacks, coats, everything that weighs down the boat. And then he jumps to lighten the weight of the boat which was beginning to sink, almost full of water. Her sister follows her and they face a chimera. They tie a rope to one arm to pull the boat and start swimming using the other and the momentum of their legs.

“There were people who couldn’t swim. I wouldn’t have sat down and complained that I was going to drown. If I was going to drown, at least I would have done it with pride for myself and for my sister,” Yusra later recalled.

“We use our legs and one arm each; we held the rope with each other and kicked and kicked. The waves kept coming and hitting me in the eye,” her story continues. That was the hardest part – the sting of the salt water. But what were we going to do, let them all drown? We were pulling and swimming to save their lives.” .

“There was a little boy, Mustafa,” recalls Yusra. “He was only about six years old. He was very funny, and when we were in the forest, we played with him and joked with him. I think when we pulled the boat, we wanted to save everyone.” , but we thought more of him.”

How Yusra and Sarah’s lives went

Years after their trip, Yusra and Sara have become celebrities. After dragging a boat through the sea for three hours and saving the lives of 18 people, her life took a radical turn. They were received by Barack Obama and Pope Francis. They settled in Berlin, just as they had planned. And their stories have traveled the world and inspired swimmersone of the great Netflix movies of recent months released in November 2021. Even though their lives have followed different paths.

In 2017 Yusra had her own apartment in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, one of the districts of Berlin. Over there received Vogue magazine, a few days after an attack in a market that brought back the worst memories. Already she had the leathery skin of his days in Damascus.

At that point Donald Trump ruled the United States and lowered the line against welcoming refugees to Europe, especially from Syria, but Yusra and Sarah had already managed to bring their family to the Old Continent.

Ezzat, the girls’ father remained a coach, got a job in a swimming club called Berliner Bäder-Betriebe. Mervat, the mother of the lowest-profile girls, also settled in Germany, as did the youngest of the sisters, Shaed.

In the end, Yusra fulfilled her and her father’s dream. He kept swimming, as he did when he heard the sound of bombs in Syria. Shortly after arriving in Berlin, he got a swimming pool for training. And in the meantime, her coach, Sven Spannekrebs, told her that he sponsors her like a father the refugees would form an Olympic team. In 2016, just one year after his odyssey, Yusra qualified for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and then repeated at Tokyo 2020.

Sarah instead became a refugee rights activist. In 2018 she was arrested by the Greek migration police for trying to help a group of migrants on the island of Lesvos. You have been accused of “espionage, trafficking and smuggling of immigrants”. Her case has prompted a complaint from Amnesty International. She spent 107 days in prison and was released on bail. This January the sentence that will define its future will have to be pronounced.