"VAN" (Sports Desk - 08.08.2025) :: Olympians Farida Abaroge, Perina Lokure Nakang and Musa Suliman are among the six athletes named on the Athlete Refugee Team (ART) that will represent millions of refugees at the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25.
This comes at a time when significant cuts in international aid to this marginalised population have drastically affected areas such as food distribution, education, child protection and health programmes. The Refugee Athlete Scholarship programme, under the Olympic Refugee Foundation in close collaboration with World Athletics and its member federations, is a pathway for refugee athletes to find a purpose in life as well as hope for them and their families through athletics.
Abaroge, Nakang and Suliman all represented the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2024 Games in Paris, while Nakang also competed at the last edition of the World Athletics Championships, in Budapest in 2023.
Abaroge, who joined the ART in 2023, has been selected for the 5000m. The 31-year-old fled her native Ethiopia in 2016, travelling through Sudan, Egypt and Libya before she was found by a French human rights group. She started running after being granted refugee status in France and in 2024 she competed at the World Cross Country Championships and the European Cross Country Championships as well as the Olympic Games, where she contested the 1500m.
Nakang’s running talent was discovered when she formed part of the World Athletics U20 refugee team pilot in 2022. The 22-year-old, who is based in Kenya, was selected for the World Cross Country Championships and the World Championships the following year. She clocked an 800m PB of 2:08.20 at the Paris Olympics but missed six months of elite training during which she went through some personal challenges, witnessed water shortages, experienced riots and tough weather conditions, and suffered from malaria and typhoid. Like Abaroge, she was awarded an Olympic Refugee Foundation Refugee Athlete Scholarship for the second time in 2025 and has returned to training.
Her fellow 800m runner Suliman is based in Switzerland and, at 21, is the youngest member of the ART in Tokyo. Suliman fled Sudan with his family in 2015 and lived in Egypt for several years before being resettled in Switzerland in 2021 through a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) programme. He took up running in 2022 and overcame a knee injury to compete at the Olympics. He has received a Refugee Athlete Scholarship this year and will make his World Championships debut in Tokyo.
This trio will be joined by marathon runners Omar Hassan and Emmanuel Kiruhura Ntagunga plus 5000m specialist Jamal Abdelmaji Eisa Mohammed in Japan, where they will compete in the home country of their team sponsor, Asics.
Like Nakang, Hassan raced at the World Championships in Budapest in 2023 and finished 40th in the marathon. The following year was difficult, both physically and mentally, as his mother – his mentor and the most special person in his life – died and Hassan became responsible for his six younger siblings. The 34-year-old, who is based in Denmark, has since returned to running and is now studying automation technology.
Ntagunga fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013 and settled in Kenya, where he began running with local athletes. The father of four began a new life with his family in Norway in 2023 through an initiative facilitated by the government of Norway and the UNHCR and he continued running as a means of integration and wellbeing. He has gone on to participate in several races in Europe, including the Copenhagen Marathon, in which he placed 11th earlier this year. He is also a member of the Refugee Athlete Scholarship programme.
Long-standing team member Eisa Mohammed, who fled Sudan at the age of 16 and is now based in Israel, joined the ART in 2019 and competed at that year’s World Championships as well as the following edition in Oregon in 2022. He focused on training after missing out on the 2023 World Championships in Budapest and came close to his PB when finishing second at the Track Night Vienna in 13:21.39 in June.
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