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Six young athletes are preparing to make history in Senegal later this month. For the first time, a Refugee Olympic Team will compete at the Youth Olympic Games, marking a new chapter for an initiative that began a decade ago at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
The team will compete at Dakar 2026, taking place from October 31 to November 13. The Games will also be the first Olympic sporting event held on African soil, welcoming approximately 2,700 young athletes from around the world to compete across 25 sports.
For the six refugee athletes, who currently live in Kenya and Uganda, Dakar offers an opportunity to compete internationally while representing people whose experiences of displacement are often missing from the world’s biggest sporting stages.
A new generation of refugee Olympians
The team includes four track and field athletes: Clement Niyomuhoza, who will compete in the boys’ 800m, Nyataba Gatloth in the girls’ 800m, Florence Masumbe in the girls’ 200m and Rachid Rochene in the boys’ 200m. Two additional athletes will compete in judo and taekwondo.
In September, all six athletes met for the first time at a training camp in Kaptagat, Kenya. There, they prepared for the Games and received guidance from two-time Olympic marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge, who shared lessons from his career competing at the highest level.
They also spent time with someone who knows what it means to compete under the Refugee Olympic Team flag.
Yiech Pur Biel, the team’s Chef de Mission, grew up in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya after fleeing conflict in South Sudan. In 2016, he competed in the 800m at the Rio Olympic Games as a member of the first Refugee Olympic Team.
Since then, Biel has become an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and a board member of the Olympic Refuge Foundation, which works to improve access to safe sport for displaced young people.
“These young people have an opportunity to be great ambassadors and represent the millions of young refugees across the world,” Biel said when the team was announced.
“I really believe that Dakar will be a life-changing moment for them, but also for refugees watching them worldwide.”
The debut comes ten years after the IOC first introduced a Refugee Olympic Team at Rio 2016. The initiative has since expanded, with refugee athletes also competing at Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. Dakar marks its first appearance at the Youth Olympic Games, which provide an international competition platform for younger athletes.
The team is supported by the IOC, Olympic Refuge Foundation, World Athletics, UNHCR and the National Olympic Committees of Kenya and Uganda.
Dakar prepares to welcome the world
The athletes’ debut is one of several milestones during the Youth Olympic Games.
The Youth Olympic Games will take place across three locations in Senegal: the capital, Dakar, the nearby city of Diamniadio and the coastal resort area of Saly. The program includes athletics, swimming, basketball 3×3, skateboarding, breaking, rugby sevens and more.
Organizers have also introduced measures intended to make the Games accessible to local communities. More than 300,000 tickets are being distributed through a program for young people, schools, sports clubs and community organizations across Senegal.
The Games arrive at a time when displacement continues to affect communities worldwide. According to UNHCR, an estimated 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced by conflict, persecution and other crises as of June 2025.
While six athletes cannot represent every experience of displacement, their participation places young refugees at the center of one of the world’s most visible sporting events.
For Biel, whose own Olympic journey began ten years ago, the significance of Dakar is also personal. The young athletes he is guiding will now have an opportunity he once experienced himself: to compete as Olympians and show other displaced young people what may be possible.
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