Inside The Swimmers true story that inspired the emotional new Netflix film

The Swimmers is the latest film to shoot up Netflix’s top ten list thanks to its extremely emosh and inspiring story line. Based in 2015, sisters and championship swimmers Yusra and Sara Mardini flee the Syrian civil war, fly to Turkey and attempt to reach Germany via Greece in hope of a safer life after their home is bombed. But their journey goes life-threateningly wrong. 

While in an overcrowded dingy with 18 others from Lebanon to Lesbos, the engine in Yusra and Sara’s boat cuts out and they start to sink. Without thinking of the danger they jump into the water, grab hold of the boat’s ropes and drag the other passengers through the waves for three and a half hours to safety. 

The plot would be totally unbelievable—if it wasn’t all true.

The true story behind Netflix’s The Swimmers 

Yusra and Sara swam for their lives for over three hours 

The Swimmers is based on the lives of the real life sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini who, before fleeing the civil war, worked all their lives to swim for their country. Their father Mohamed Ezzat Mardini had trained them in their local pool in Damascus and had taken them to compete in world championships for Syria in Dubai and Turkey. 

But when civil war started in Syria in 2011, Yusra and Sara’s father was tortured due to mistaken identity, the family’s home was destroyed by bombing, an unexploded bomb landed in the pool where Yusra was training and they realised they had to leave in 2015. 

Yusra and Sara’s parents said the sisters should travel to Europe and after they’d flown to Turkey they decided to get on a boat to Greece. The boat was meant to be carrying seven people but there were 18 others passengers on board and while the group of refugees were travelling across the water the engine stalled and the waves started to fill the boat. 

Along with two other passengers, Yusra and Sara jumped out of the boat and swam next to it for three hours to keep the other passengers afloat until they reached Lesbos and began making their way to Germany on foot, facing sexual assault and discrimination on the way. 

When they arrived in Germany they trained with a coach called Sven

When Yusra and Sarah reached Germany, they lived in a refugee centre and met a swimming coach called Sven Spannekrebs who was coaching at Wasserfreunde Spandau 04 near where they were living in Berlin, according to ABC News. 

Sven trained the girls at his club and secured Yusra a space on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Refugee Olympic Team for the 2016 Rio Olympics and carried on training her until 2018.

Yusra swam butterfly twice in the Olympics for Team Refugee 

Yusra won her 100m butterfly heat in Brazil and ranked 41st. “The moment I entered the stadium, that changed the way I think about the word refugee,” she told Olympic Day at the time. “I know that I am maybe not carrying my country’s flag but I’m carrying the Olympic flag which represents the whole wide world.”

Four years later, Yusra also competed at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo for the IOC Refugee Olympic Team and was eliminated in the heats for the 100m butterfly after swimming the distance in 1:06.78. 

Yusra actually swam in The Swimmers as a stunt double

After previously refusing to give production companies the rights to their life stories, Yusra and Sara agreed to work on The Swimmers with the freelance producer Ali Jaafar and director Sally El Hosaini, who made sure the film’s cast and crew was made up of numerous refugees.

Sally also cast real sisters, Nathalie and Manal Issa, to play Yusra and Sara but they didn’t know how to swim. So, the real sister’s coach Sven gave the actresses some of their first lessons.

And even though Yusra was training for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics at the time, she actually acted as her own stunt double in The Swimmers and helped film most of the swimming pool scenes, according to Forbes.

“Sara and I, we have been creative since we were young,” Yusra told The Guardian. “It’s the same with Nathalie and Manal. That was the beauty of it because they come from a similar background, they knew exactly what we went through as girls. That’s what made it so amazing.”

Where is Sara Mardini now? 

Sara quit swimming when she got to Germany because of a shoulder injury and started doing humanitarian work instead. In 2018, she was arrested in Lesbos and was charged with spying, smuggling and belonging to a criminal organisation and spent more than 100 days in jail in Athens, according to the Guardian. 

Her trial started in November 2021 and is still ongoing. If Sara’s found guilty of the crimes, which the Human Rights Watch have called “absurd” then she could face up to 20 years in prison. 

Where is Yusra Mardini now? 

After competing in two Olympic games, the then nineteen-year-old Yusra became the youngest Goodwill Ambassador for the UNHCR in history and has said she wants to launch a foundation that will support refugees. 

But because Yusra now has her official German paperwork, she’s no longer able to swim for team refugee at the next Olympics: “I am in complete denial. I feel like it wasn’t the right way for me to say goodbye to swimming,” she told Stylist. “ I didn’t decide whether I want to take a break, give it one last try or say, ‘OK, it’s time to move on’. I feel like I’m grieving.”

Featured image credit via Netflix.

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