The Related Press (AP) accused a number of European nations competing within the Winter Olympics of getting a scarcity of variety on their groups, claiming they’re “overwhelmingly white.”
In an article from the AP, the outlet highlighted how “immigration from Africa and the Center East has remodeled the demographics of Europe in current many years.” The outlet additionally famous that whereas the US was “sending considered one of its most numerous groups,” the group rosters for international locations resembling France, Germany, and Switzerland “look loads like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and missing the immigrant illustration.”
“On the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a group made up nearly solely of ethnically Swedish athletes, with NHL participant Mika Zibanejad, whose father is from Iran, a uncommon exception,” the AP wrote. “That hardly displays the range of the Nordic nation: About 2 million of its 10 million residents have been born overseas, about half of them in Asia or Africa, in accordance with nationwide statistics company SCB.”
The AP article continued partially:
The dearth of athletes of shade on the Winter Olympics — and in winter sports activities basically — has been a recurring theme within the U.S., which is sending considered one of its most numerous groups to the Video games. It hasn’t gotten the identical consideration in Europe.
The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and different European winter sports activities nations look loads like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and missing the immigrant illustration seen of their soccer or basketball groups.
Within the article, Maryan Hashi — a Somali migrant, who “got here to Sweden together with her household in 2009” defined to the outlet the way it wasn’t till 2018 that she found “there was a ski slope 5 minutes from her dwelling, after a co-worker steered she attempt snowboarding as a part of a pilot integration challenge.”
“While you don’t have info or entry or anyone round you does it — snowboarding is principally a white sport — and whenever you’re not accurately built-in into the group, you don’t know a lot about it,” Hashi advised the outlet.
Josef Fahlen, who works as a “professor of sport pedagogy at Umea College in Sweden,” defined to the outlet how “the kids of non-European immigrants are unlikely to be launched to sports activities that their mother and father are usually not acquainted with.”:
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