Abdullah Sediqi was once a taekwondo star in Afghanistan, but had to leave his country following several physical attacks in 2017. With the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris approaching, he hopes to win a medal.
Sarina Salehi has high goals. Because Olympic wrestling is forbidden for her as a girl in Iran, her family fled with her to Germany. Here, the young talent is training for her big dream.
Adnan Al Mousa Alfermli was wounded as a teenager by a sniper in the civil war in Syria and now uses a wheelchair. The 25-year-old, who now lives in Spain, is training for his ultimate goal of taking home a gold medal.
Sport is strictly forbidden for women in Afghanistan, so hundreds fled into exile. Now they are demanding a direct line to the IOC with hopes of competing at the Paris Games in 2024. What are their chances?
After the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, former Afghanistan Women Football Federation president Arezo Rahimi left for Spain, where she remains dedicated to the sport. Despite many challenges in her new life, Rahimi continues to shine a light on refugees and women's football.
Italian rugby player Ivan Nemer will start coaching migrants after giving a rotten banana to a Black teammate for Christmas. As a result of the racist prank, he was banned from the sport for almost half a year.
He once had to flee his homeland but now he is on track to become Germany's youngest grandmaster: Hussain Besou's talent and ambition could catapult him into the highest echelons of chess. Later this month, the 11-year-old Syrian will play for the German national team in Croatia as the youngest national player ever.
Fighting, struggling, and never giving up on building her own destiny. That's Ramla Ali's story. The English-Somali boxer carved out a place for herself in the boxing world against all odds that were stacked against her. At 33, she is a source of inspiration on and off the boxing ring.
Afghanistan's former internationals continue to play football together – in Australian exile. The sport's global governing body, FIFA, has so far denied them recognition as the Afghan national team.
In February 2022, Clinton Chalokwu was selected in Nigeria to play for the Ukrainian first division Vorskla Poltava football team. But the Russian invasion on February 24 crushed this young Nigerian’s dreams. Now in France, he is threatened with deportation.
The Pakistani hockey player Shahida Raza set sail from Turkey, headed for Italy, in the hope of a better future. But her hopes were shattered off the coasts of Calabria in the Ionic Sea on February 26 when she perished in one of the deadliest shipwrecks off the Italian coast in recent years.
More than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees in France have spent the past year trying to adjust to their new life. Nearly 3,000 Ukrainians have been granted a temporary residence permit in the Hauts-de-Seine region, just west of Paris, of which 1,710 have been renewed, according to the prefecture. Among them are Liudmyla and her daughter Alisa, who settled in the town of Antony after fleeing Kyiv in April of 2022. In this Paris surburb, the young Alisa has been able to pursue her passion for gymnastics, like 15 of her felllow Ukrainians. FRANCE 24 reports.