Abstract:

It is a matter of common knowledge the fact that the International Olympic Movement is characterized by dynamism and adaptability to the challenges of modern society. A significant proof of this is the establishment of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, since 2016, at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, a practice continued in Tokyo in 2020 and with considerable chances to be successfully repeated in subsequent editions: Paris 2024 and Dakar 2026. This phenomenon is all the more welcome as, after the global refugee crisis of 2015, when the whole world has seen millions of people in the world displaced, we are now experiencing the negative effects of the war, started in February 2022 in Ukraine, which caused the exodus of Ukrainian population to neighboring countries. Therefore, the international Olympic community must decide how to integrate Ukrainian athletes with refugee status into the Olympic system. Considering the fact that most of these athletes are students or about to become students, the problem of their double integration arises, in a new competitive system, but also in a new educational system. We thus find that the fastest assimilation of refugee athletes in neighboring countries is supposed to happen together with their integration into the educational system, precisely in institutions with a sports profile in order to support them both in their academic course as in achieving sports performance. Until the establishment of an internationally agreed policy in this respect, Romania and the Republic of Moldova, as countries directly involved in this process, must find on the spot solutions to allow athletes to continue their Olympic career. This article describes those strategies adopted by Sports Universities in order to help integrate athletes in a new educational and training system and analyzes their impact on the performance of athletes in their pursue for the Olympics. Thus, our study is shadowing the impact of the unexpected changes imposed by the war background on the educational system in neighboring countries and their common goal and will to help integrate refugee students, and, in the same time, the impact of this struggle on native students and their attitude towards these new learning and training environemnt.

Keywords:

Olympic Movement, Olympic Games, integration, refugees, athletes.