The Associated Press is naming and shaming majority-white European nations competing in the Winter Olympics for their apparent lack of diversity, insisting the recent influx of migrants into the countries should be instantly represented among their most elite athletes.
“At the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, Sweden is sending a team made up almost exclusively of ethnically Swedish athletes,” the article states, noting NHL player Mika Zibanejad, whose father is of Iranian descent, is a standout exception in the Scandinavian country’s contingent.
“That hardly reflects the diversity of the Nordic country: About 2 million of its 10 million residents were born abroad, about half of them in Asia or Africa,” AP scolds, citing Statistic Sweden’s demographic figures.
“The Olympic rosters of France, Germany, Switzerland and other European winter sports nations look a lot like Sweden’s: overwhelmingly white and lacking the immigrant representation seen in their soccer or basketball teams.”
The article hoists 30-year-old snowboarder Maryan Hashi — a Swedish immigrant from Somalia — as an avatar in its attempted takedown of the scourge of “overwhelming” whiteness at this year’s games, who told the outlet she felt like an “alien” when she took to the slopes in the country’s snowy north.
Upon being welcomed to Sweden with open arms with her family in 2009, Hashi said it was a “culture shock” and “scary” to integrate with native Swedes due to the language barrier, “so her friendship group consisted of fellow migrants from Somalia and other African countries.”
She got into snowboarding through a pilot project run by Skelleftea, the municipality she lived in, a program specifically aimed at helping newcomers better integrate into the country’s culture.
But despite participating in a program quite literally set up to help migrants and asylum seekers find community and assimilate, Hashi somehow still felt adrift and without help.
“When you don’t have information or access or nobody around you does it — snowboarding is basically a white sport — and when you’re not correctly integrated into the community, you don’t know much about it,” she told the outlet.
AP spoke to Josef Fahlen, a sport pedagogy professor at Umea University in Sweden, who insisted the lack of diversity is not a “winter sports problem but a cultural issue” and noted that the kind of “cultural shift” needed to diversify classically white-dominated sports takes “not years but decades.”
Fahlen also pointed out that children usually become interested in sports — and stay active in them — based on what their parents are familiar with, which he says is the “simple” explanation for European ski slopes being largely dominated by Europeans.
He pointed to Liverpool’s Alexander Isak on Sweden’s men’s national soccer team — whose parents are from Eritrea — as a case of sporting preferences being passed down from parents to child.
“Take the example of Isak finding his way into football — it makes total sense because football exists in Eritrea. Skiing doesn’t,” Fahlen said.
The outlet cornered Sweden’s ski federation about why it hasn’t done more to diversify its slopes.
“We want to do better,” they told the outlet. “Inclusion is something we strive for.”
The AP also notes that “participating in winter sports can be expensive because of the need to buy or rent equipment and clothing, and paying for travel and a ski pass.”
But the Swedish ski federation has been working to level the socioeconomic playing field for nearly two decades, launching its “Alla På Snö” (“Everyone On Snow”) program in 2008, which has provided free equipment and access to slopes for around 30,000 children.
Sweden’s Leisure Bank project is also on the case, loaning winter sports-curious people equipment like ski boots and skis for free for two weeks at a time, the founders likening the lending program to a public library.
But none of these efforts seemed to meet AP’s high bar for diversity and inclusion, flatly noting “neither specifically targets immigrants, however.”
The AP, a nonprofit news organization, did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post, including whether it believes the diversity figures among Olympic teams outside of Europe are also problematic.
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