Her name echoing around the stadium, Cindy Ngamba stepped into the Olympic ring and danced from one foot to the other, throwing punches with her bright blue Paris 2024 boxing gloves.
Having won her first fight at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday, 25-year-old Cindy Ngamba is now just one win away from the refugee team’s first Olympic medal. Following a gruelling bout against the 2022 world champion, Canada’s Tammara Thibeault, the chance of a medal looks closer than ever.
“I’m going to be the first refugee in history to go all the way,” she said. “There’s a lot of pressure. I’m human, I have emotions and I’m not going to hide from them, but I never let the pressure get to me. I’ve been through so many obstacles in life, like millions of refugees.”
Replacing Ngamba as one of the 37 athletes who make up the largest refugee Olympic team selected since the idea of assembling such a group was conceived ahead of the Rio de Janeiro Summer Games in 2016.
The Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are a safe haven for athletes who have had to flee their countries because of war or political persecution, giving them the chance to continue practising their sport.
Many saw Ngamba’s triumph on Wednesday as a message of hope at a time when migration is at an all-time high and 100 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes.
Ngamba’s team is “a symbol of inclusion, equality and success for a large community of refugees and displaced people around the world”, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, in an interview with the AP on Sunday.
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Born in Cameroon, Cindy Ngamba moved to England at the age of 11. She left “for a better life” and set about making a fresh start in England and learning a new language. Now she trains with the British team in Sheffield.
“There are so many refugees going through so many problems,” she says. “They don’t believe in themselves and feel like it’s the end of the world. I hope that when they look at me, they’ll see that everything I’ve been through in life, I’ve overcome.”
Ngamba was cheered on by a packed stadium on Wednesday and a group of people cheered as they carried placards reading “For the refugees”. All the while, Ngamba went to work with her gloves on, expelling air as she landed punches.
