Here's Why Rio 2016 Olympics Will Be The Best One Yet

Forget what you heard.

Friday, August 5, 2016 - 13:19

So it’s the Opening Ceremony for the Rio Olympics tonight… AND WE CAN’T ACTUALLY WAIT.

Obviously last time (2012) was super fun as the Games were held here in London and Olympic excitement was palpable just about everywhere along the tube line. Our opening ceremony, directed by ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ mastermind director Danny Boyle, was really something special too. We had real NHS nurses performing, and the Queen entered the stadium by parachuting out of a helicopter alongside James Bond. There she goes.

What’s making us above-the-average-Olympics excited though is that there is going to be a REFUGEE OLYMPIC TEAM – the first team of its kind.

And after the World has witnessed the worst refugee crisis since WW2, there’s never been a better time to celebrate and recognize their achievements. The team represents all of those who have recently risked their lives to travel to a safer place, and have been through atrocities that no-one should ever have had to. They are, as the Rio Olympics states, a ‘symbol of hope for refugees worldwide’.

There are 10 athletes in the Refugee team, two of which actually fled from Syria. Seriously, how did they do all that AND qualify for the World’s biggest sporting event? It actually makes us a bit embarrassed about all the things we could have achieved while we were at home watching Ex On The Beach and Love Island…

Five of the others are from South Sudan, two are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and one competitor is from Ethiopia. While we will be supporting all of the team, Syrian refugee Yusra Mardini is probably our fave to win.

Why? She’s pretty amazing. Yusra is only 18, and made the perilous journey from Syria to Greece in August 2015 with her sister. The dinghy they travelled across the sea in was made for 6 people but contained 20 refugees (a common problem), and when the motor stopped Yusra, along with two others, jumped in to push the boat ashore. Saving all of their lives.

By competing in the Olympics, Yusra wants to make people all over the World realize that refugees are just normal people. She stated that she wanted to impart some hope to everyone in Damascus, the Syrian city where she used to live, too. “I want everyone to think of their dreams, because a lot of people there forget their dreams”, she said.

Need we say more? Yusra is already an absolute champion BUT WE WANNA SEE HER GET A MEDAL.