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Billie Jean King once said that pressure is a privilege — but what do you do when the system won't let you feel any pressure at all because it won't let you in? For Senda Berenson Abbott, the answer was to stop knocking on closed doors and build an entirely new stadium. The sport she invented from scratch now fills arenas from coast to coast.
Getting cut. Being told you're too slow, too small, or too broken to compete. For most athletes, that's the end of the story. For these five, it was the beginning of the most important chapter. What they share isn't just grit — it's something more specific, and more instructive, than that.
They arrived in Rio carrying no national anthem, no flag of their own, and years of loss that most Olympic athletes couldn't imagine. The story of the first Refugee Olympic Team isn't just about sport — it's about what human beings are capable of when someone finally decides to believe in them.