In theory the Olympics are an occasion for each country to send its best athletes into the ring. But geopolitics are messy, with borders changing, power shifting, new nations emerging and collapsing every decade. This year, the International Olympic Committee has created a new team for a group of people with no nation: the Refugee Olympic Team.

“These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem,” said IOC president Thomas Bach. Therefore, the “Olympic anthem will be played in their honour and the Olympic flag will lead them into the Olympic Stadium.” The athletes on the Refugee Olympic Team have been displaced from Syria, South Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Modern refugees aren’t the first to compete without a country, however. Olympic history is rife with examples of stateless athletes, people from colonized nations competing on behalf of colonial powers, and competitors from places in limbo. The International Olympic Committee acknowledges roughly the same nations that the UN does, and even a few extras. Still, there have always been competitors whose origins don’t fit the standard definition of a country.

In 2012, for example, three athletes competed from Curaçao — formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles, which dissolved in 2010. Curaçao wasn’t recognized by the International Olympic Committee, so they came as independent athletes. The same thing had happened in 2000, when four athletes represented East Timor, which was at that point transitioning to independence (it was recognized by the UN in 2002).

This tradition of letting quasi-stateless athletes compete under the Olympic Flag, instead of a single country’s flag, began in 1992, when the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in tatters and 58 qualified Yugoslav athletes found themselves with no flag to fly. So the International Olympic Committee created a new “independent Olympic participants” category for them. That same year, twelve former USSR states — now suddenly post-Soviet countries, many without the infrastructure to get an Olympic committee together — built a coalition called the Unified Team. They, too, flew the Olympic Flag instead of a single nation’s flag. Eventually they would all go on to compete as independent nations.