Terrible fire drives one athlete on

GILBERT TUHABONYE always loved to run. As a child he ran barefoot for miles around the Burundi village where he grew up. As a teenager he toured the country competing in cross country races. On the night of October 21st, 1993, however, he ran for another reason. He ran because his body was on fire.

The 21 year old middle distance runner has not yet made any impact on the international athletics scene and may not even compete at the Olympic Games next week, but Tuhabonye's may already be one of the most extraordinary sports stories of the year.

That story is etched forever across his sinewy body, a trail of shiny dark scar tissue that climbs his right leg then spreads out across his back like the embossed lettering on a glossy book cover.

Tuhabonye says the scars are the result of appalling burns he? sustained when a mob of Hutus rounded up Tutsi students at his high school, locked them in a room, doused them with petrol and set them on fire. There were 250 students in the room, he says, and he was the sole survivor.

It is impossible to verify the details of Tuhabonye's account of the incident and perhaps, in the face of his incontrovertibly grotesque injuries, churlish even to try.

Tuhabonye says he survived by hiding underneath a pile of his burning classmates. When the bodies above him burned through, he pushed them aside and found others to shield himself from the full heat of the blaze.

After around eight hours, Tuhabonye says, he managed to use bones from one of the bodies to break open a window at the top of the shed. A Hutu militiaman spotted him as he tumbled through it but another man told him not to give chase "He say He is finished, don't follow him."

Tuhabonye run. "I tried to run fast. I ran one kilometre and stopped because I was very tired. I tried to breathe and when I did this I realised I was burning"

Tuhabonye lay down in a grassy patch to try to put out the fire and that is where a patrol of Burundian government soldiers found him sever hours later. He spent three months in hospital in the Burundian capital, Bujumbur Tuhabonye had been offered sporting scholarship to Tulane University in the United but now his hopes appeared to have been buried.

Then in April Jim Minnihan, the director of a Georgia based programme that trains promising Third World athletes, heard of Tuhabonye's story. A few weeks later Tuhabonye was training in the salubrious surroundings of LaGrange's private Methodist college on a scholarship partly funded by the International Olympic Committee.

A native Swahili and French speaker, Tuhabonye embarked on a crash course in English and plans to study computer science and business administration at the college.

Tuhabonye's performances have improved steadily since he began training in the United States but he has yet to post an Olympic qualifying time for either of his two events, the 800 metres and 1500 metres.

Burundi, competing for the first time in an Olympics, has just one wild card slot which it has allocated to a female athlete training in La Grange. Minnihan plans to petition IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch for a special dispensation to allow Tuhabonye to compete.

"If I miss this Olympic Games, the next Olympic Games I will be the star," says Tuhabonye, who ran a leg of the torch relay. "If 249 persons die and only one survives, I realise that God has something for me. When I run, I say God likes me."