Mirsada Burić ran her way out of a civil war. She was twenty-two years old and living in Sarajevo when, in 1992, she was chosen to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Summer Olympics, in Barcelona. It was an awkward time to be training for a three-thousand-meter race. The republics of the former Yugoslavia—among them Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—were breaking out into war. Bosnia and Herzegovina had voted for independence in March, and, on April 5th, ultra-nationalist Serb militias, with the support of Serbian president Slobodon Milošević, bent on carving out a Greater Serbia from neighboring Bosnia, began the Siege of Sarajevo, which would send the city into a state of terror for more than three years. Snipers, stationed on the hills overlooking Sarajevo, picked off civilians at random. Shells blew apart thousands of homes. On one of Burić’s runs, near the stadium that had been used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, she narrowly avoided being hit when a barrage of shells landed around her. On another occasion, while stretching in a park, she heard a sniper’s bullet slice the air over her head and hit a tree. “It sounded like a whip,” she said.