Baladi - Covergae
The 20-year-old was given a standing ovation at the 2016 Games just one year after helping to swim a sinking boat carrying refugees in the Mediterranean to safety.
Yusra Mardini left her home in the war-ravaged capital Damascus in 2015 and headed to Turkey with her older sister Sara.
One evening, the pair boarded a dinghy on the Turkish coast along with 20 others – three times more people than it was designed to carry. As the overcrowded boat made its way towards Greece, it started to sink.
With no other choice, Mardini and her sister, also a strong swimmer, along with two other refugees jumped into the sea and dragged the small vessel for more than three hours to the Greek island of Lesbos.
As the crowd erupted in applause for swimmer Yusra Mardini at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, it was hard to believe the teenager nearly drowned at sea just a year earlier escaping war in Syria.
Now the extraordinary story of the young Syrian athlete who took Rio de Janeiro by storm is to be told in a Hollywood movie and a memoir that she hopes will inspire others and challenge negative perceptions of refugees.
When she was initially offered the chance to be part of the first refugee team to compete in the Olympics, Mardini nearly said no, fearing the response would be pity.
The experience of competing under the Olympic flag along with nine fellow refugees transformed that view, giving her a new sense of pride in her status.
“A lot of people think refugees are poor, or that they wanted to do this trip (to Europe). But those people went out of their country because there was a lot of violence,” she said.
“I want to change people’s perception of what a refugee is. I’m going to keep supporting and fighting for refugees.”
Reporting by Lin Taylor, for The Independent