Forced Migration and Elite Sport

Several Syrian elite water polo player migrated to Europe after the Syrian Civil War broke out. After having resettled in different countries and having resumed their sport careers, they took part as a team in different water polo events. While they believe that sport helped them much integrating into Europe, their biographical trajectories differ widely. Considering sport, only one of several young talents, who were once teammates, is playing to date water polo at a professional level. This project focuses on how forced migration influences and is influenced by socialisation in competitive sport. To this aim, (sport) biographies of athletes with refugee experiences were collected and analysed. Between 2016 and 2019, this project examined the sport socialisation of a group of (former) elite Syrian water polo players, who migrated in different European countries. Under methodological and theoretical aspects, this project is carried out through multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995) and is based on the interactional concept of socialisation theory (Hurrelmann, 1988/2009). The sport biographies, the coping strategies to deal with sport ambitions and the relevance of sport after the resettlement of these refugee athletes lay at the core of the analyses (Michelini, 2018, 2020, 2020-Submitted). The results indicate that forced migration as a critical life event (John, Gropper, & Thiel, 2019) constitutes at many levels an impediment for a sport career. However, the sample examined delivers a heterogeneous picture, which include cases of dropout but also of increased participation in sport.