135 The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous, national revolt against the government of Hungary and its Soviet policies. The aim of the Revolution was to get free from Soviet control. Search for the names of these baseball players who escaped from Cuba. Did they have a career in baseball in the USA? WHEN SPORT SAVES LIVES Sports and refugees Sometimes sports can be a way to escape for people living in countries where freedom is not granted or where wars and terrorism put life into danger. International sports events have often been used by athletes to leave their home countries and start a new life in other nations, sometimes applying for citizenship or gaining the refugee status, thus having the possibility to continue competing in their sport. A history of escapes The CECAFA Senior Challenge Cup is a football tournament organised by the Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations. It features national teams from East and Central Africa. See the story of the Mardini sisters in the film clip The Swimmers at the end of Module 2. ONLINE RESOURCES Athletes and citizenship: stories The first recorded Olympic defection was in 1948 when Marie Provaznikova, the coach of the Czechoslovakian women s gymnastics team, refused to return home after her team won gold at the London Olympics. She reported a lack of freedom in Czechoslovakia, which had just become a Soviet state. Provaznikova moved to the USA, where she asked for refugee status. At the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, a great number of athletes in the Hungarian Olympic Team decided not to return home after the Soviet Union suppressed the Hungarian Revolution . The entire water polo team, a significant number of gymnasts, and other athletes defected; most of them Marie Provaznikova settled in Australia, Canada, and the USA, asking for political asylum and then obtaining citizenship. Quite a lot of defections have concerned Cuban athletes. In the 1990s, several baseball players from the national team defected while taking part in international tournaments in the United States . For Cubans who defected to the United States, obtaining USA citizenship was made possible through specific legal agreements that were available at the time. In 2012, the twenty-two members of the Eritrean National football team left for Uganda to take part in the Cecafa Cup tournament. Only four of them, however, came back home to Eritrea, while the others escaped, asking the UN High Committee for Refugees for asylum. Two years later, they found refuge in Holland. The Refugee Olympic team In 2016, the International Olympic Committee created the Refugee Olympic Team, allowing athletes who had the refugee status due to war, persecution, or other crises going on in their home countries to compete in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Initially, the team had ten athletes from four different countries; at Tokyo 2020, there were twenty-nine athletes from eleven countries and at Paris 2024 the athletes were thirty-seven, from eleven countries. The team is represented by a white flag with the Olympic circles on it. home affairs: affari interni water polo: pallanuoto weightlifting: sollevamento pesi 246 HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND CIVIC EDUCATION