Dream still on track for refugee runners
Displaced athletes see hope and progress from Rio to London
LONDON— When the first runners crossed the finish line, Anjelina Nadai Lohalith was still on the other side of the track with 150 metres to go.
It was the first day of the world athletics championships and the crowd was buzzing with anticipation for the meet’s biggest stars — Usain Bolt and Mo Farah — but there was applause for her, as there always is for an athlete who keeps pushing hard even when the race is long over.
It was nice to hear, but Lohalith didn’t need the encouragement to keep going.
She never gives up — not in her 1,500metre heat here Friday, and not in life. She intends to achieve far more than her challenging circumstances set her up to do.
It’s that courage and spirit that led her to give her parents a hasty moment’s goodbye when the South Sudanese civil war hit her home in 2002, and flee with a relative for Kenya when she was just a child.
That journey eventually took her to the Kakuma refugee camp and a race that would change her life, taking her to the Rio Olympics and here as part of the first-ever Athlete Refugee Team.
“I was happy and excited,” the 23-yearold said of her race.
“This was my time to come and do better.”
Her 1,500-metre time of four minutes and 33 seconds was a big improvement on Rio, and she knows that with more training she’ll get better still. How much better she doesn’t know, but as she says, that’s not all that matters.
“In sport it’s not only winning the golds. It is to bring people together to create peace,” she says.
Ateam of five runners here at the worlds is determined to represent the crisis faced by more than 65 million displaced people around the globe.
“Anybody can become a refugee, I or you. You never know. It might happen tomorrow,” she says.
The refugee team is the brainchild of Tegla Loroupe, the first African woman to win the New York City Marathon and once the world record holder at the distance.
She grew up in Kenya’s conflictprone far north. Now her foundation runs races to promote peace and provide opportunities to athletes, and supports a training centre for runners in Nairobi.
That’s where Lohalith and her teammates now live and train.
“As a former athlete, I know what it means for somebody who never had opportunity,” Loroupe said after the team’s Monday morning training session here.
“These kids, (as) refugees, their life is difficult, so for me it is just to open the door for them to see if they can be successful.” It hasn’t always been easy, she says. They come with few possessions — the Swiss sports company On provides running shoes and gear — and a lot of suspicions. It’s hard for people who have been through so much to believe that someone wants to help them, rather than take advantage of them, she says.
But the champion distance runner needed a hand herself once, and she knows the power of sports to change lives — not in the North American sense of million-dollar contracts, but by offering hope and opportunity.
“To run with the best, it gives them motivation. You never know tomorrow . . . some champions may come from these people,” Loroupe says.
There has already been an impact in her training camp and the refugee camps in Kenya, where she holds trials to make the team. Three of the men who competed at the Rio Olympics aren’t here because they were beaten by other runners at the trials.
“The people who are here today became better than those who went to the Olympics. That means the Olympians gave motivation to the people in the camp, to show them they can do it,” she says.
“They understand you have to struggle to get a better life.”
Lohalith and Ahmed Bashir Farah, a19-year-old Somali refugee who did not advance out of his 800-metre heat, are both done competing here now.
On Wednesday, Kadar Omar, a 20year-old Ethiopian refugee, competes in the 5,000-metre heats.
On Thursday, Rose Nathike Lokonyen, a 23-year-old from South Su- danese, competes in 800 heats and Dominic Lokinyomo, also from South Sudan, tries to advance in the 1,500.
They compete without a nation’s flag, but their athletic dreams are pretty much the same as those of athletes who proudly compete in their nation’s uniform. Lokinyomo dreams of breaking the world record someday; Omar hopes to be running alongside idol Mo Farah in the closing stretch of the 5,000; Lokonyen is wide-eyed about the prospect of running alongside Caster Semenya in the 800.
In Rio, Lokonyen led the refugee team — made up of runners, swim- mers and other athletes — in the opening ceremonies, carrying the International Olympic Committee flag.
“Now, we are the voices of (other refugees). We give hope to them . . . and courage to be something, and not be isolated and say we are just refugees, we can’t do anything,” she says. “You have to have courage and also have hope that in the future you can do something better in life.”
That’s what Lohalith always wanted.
As well as the dangers of civil war and an early marriage, her opportunities at home consisted of getting to watch the cattle or collect firewood. She wanted more. “I really wanted a chance to go to school,” she says.
She finished high school in the Kakuma refugee camp and is now hoping for the chance at a scholarship, to attend university and have a career after running.
“This sport came like a dream to me. I used to (run) in primary school just for fun. I didn’t know that I could come this far to compete in the world, so running is now like a dream, but for the rest of my life I’ve been wishing to become a doctor,” she said.
“It is only education that can do that,” she says.
“I can not expect to run for the rest of my life.”