Refugees run long, inspiring road to Olympic world stage
NAIROBI, Kenya — They were used to running barefoot on baking ground. They were raw, untrained. All eager.
Each day, the five runners who grew up in the Kakuma refugee camp pounded the dusty tracks past thousands of makeshift tents to pass the time. Until there was a lifeline. Workers from the foundation of former marathon world-record holder Tegla Loroupe arrived to hold athletic trials, and the five excelled. For this group of runners, many with no family and all with little schooling, running could offer food, a solid house. Proper shoes.
“When I started the project, I said ‘What can I do with these people?’” coach Volker Wagner said. What he didn’t have to worry about was their “eagerness to run.”
The five runners are refugees, five of 65 million across the world who have been displaced from their homes. Now, they’re also track athletes, and they’re going to the Olympics.
The runners, all from South Sudan, are part of the IOC’s first 10-member
refugee team. It’s a team of athletes whose roads to Rio de Janeiro have surely been harder, but whose journeys might ultimately be more heartwarming, than any of the other 10,000-plus athletes who will compete at the globe’s biggest sports event.
“When we go to Rio we are going to give a message that a refugee can do anything any other human being can do,” said Yiech Pur Biel, a 21-yearold 800-meter runner who now trains with the group at a base in the foothills just outside of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
The refugee team is made up of sportsmen
“When we go to Rio we are going to give a message that a refugee can do anything any other human being can do.” – YIECH PUR BIEL, RUNNER WHO TRAINS WITH THE GROUP
and women who have talent and drive, and the same dreams of competing on the world’s largest stage as athletes from all over the globe. But they have no way of representing their countries, countries they were forced to flee. So they’ve been given a flag, the Olympic flag, to march behind at the opening ceremony in Rio and to compete under at the games.
They have stories of unfathomable hardship.
Yiech was a 9-year-old boy caught up in the Sudanese civil war in 2005 when his mother — with no food and no other hope — left him with a neighbor and went in search of something to eat for her family. She didn’t come back. Yiech was sent, alone, to the vast Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya.