Think of all the swimmers we’ve seen in just two days — Phelps. Ledecky. Vollmer. Prime-time, medal-winning, titans of the sport. Somewhere on that list is a swimmer, not for Team USA, not coming home with a medal, but who made history in a way that would make any American proud.
Day one of the Olympics:
A girl from Atlanta trades some pins. But this girl, Nuna Bamatraf, swam in the Olympics just 30 minutes earlier.
“You walk out, you look up, and you don’t expect there to be as many people as there are,” she said.
For a land far from Atlanta.
“My mom met my dad in Yemen. She’s American,” Nuna said. “They got married in Yemen, and they moved back when my mom was pregnant with me.”
Nuna Bamatraf grew up in Cherokee County, and then Cobb County. She loved the pool, and a few years back, her dad Ahmed believed she could be an Olympian to his home country — a country that has, for more than a year, been locked in a civil war.
“To think about how they’re surviving from day to day,” said Ahmed Bamatraf. “I still have the nice and good memories about the place I grew up as a child, and it changed so much.”
But Ahmed’s child could do something different. With dual citizenship, Nuna qualified to swim for Yemen.
“Just ‘cuz they’re so conversative over there, not many girls swim at all,” she said.
None had swum n the Olympics — until Nuna. On Saturday, she became Yemen’s first-ever female Olympic swimmer, at the age of 16.
“It feels like a normal meet, but then you dive in, and you can see the cameras rushing underwater with you, and that’s when you’re like, ‘Wow — this is happening!'”
Nuna finished the 100-meter fly in 43rd place. Thirty minutes later, she stands anonymous in the park. But this girl from Atlanta did something big in Rio.
“Almost intimidating,” she said. “Because they’re so many people setting history, like Missy Franklin and Michael Phelps, and it may not be in the same way, but I’m setting history, too.”
Nuna’s family was here in Rio, but she had a cheering section back in Cobb County. Lassiter High School actually held a watch party. Nuna saw it and re-Tweeted it.
Article reprinted from 11alive.com and written by Matthew Pearl, WXIA.
