The invisible Olympians

Three stories from this series appeared on June 3, 2020, in the summer issue of the Belgian magazine MO* Magazine. This summer an online dossier will follow with several inspiring stories about politics, society and ordinary people with an extraordinary love for sports. 

"Sport releases a natural morphine and evokes special emotions. It is a mechanism that can be found in the performances of the great Olympians, but also in the small ones, on dusty squares and hidden playing fields. 

Sport connects people, helps them to transcend themselves and is therefore also used as a weapon to emancipate marginalised groups. I noticed this when I played a game of football with the ladies of Gantoise Plantrekkers, a local branch of Younited Belgium (formerly Belgian Homeless Teams) in Ghent. The ladies rightly call themselves experts in daily survival. I wasn't the only one joining them that day; Jocelyne Amani was also a guest. The Congolese footballer had set up a real football league in the turbulent eastern Congo. They understood without many words what a football match could do. I wondered how we could convey this feeling to a wider audience. That's where the idea came from to bring together the victories, but also the obstacles of sporting and social entrepreneurship, in different places around the world."

The Invisible Olympians project opens with a series of reports. In the meantime, we are continuing to build an interactive spin-off in which users themselves have to make challenging sporting and social choices.

Photo: © Dieter Telemans