Spirit of Bikila still inspires a continent of champions

ATHLETICS:North Africans will again dominate tomorrow's World Championships, in part because the rest of the world is afraid to take them on, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

YOU'VE RUN 26 miles. Only 385 yards to go. You're beyond tired. Every muscle in your body is either vacant or numb. Only gravity is propelling you. But you're in the lead. About to win your first major marathon. My advice would be DO NOT STOP. Unless you absolutely have to empty the last remaining contents of your stomach. Unless you have great pain threshold. Unless you're an Ethiopian.

Last Sunday, when leading the Rome marathon, with 385 yards to go, Siraj Gena stopped. He bent down, untied his laces, slipped off both shoes and threw them to the side of the road. He then sprinted on, barefoot, to the finish, winning in two hours, eight minutes and 39 seconds.

On crossing the line, in front of the Coliseum, Gena was thrown an Ethiopian flag, which he raised aloft in the most splendiferous salute. He looked back to see two Kenyan runners chasing him home. Perfect, he thought. No doubt Bikila would have agreed.

This was an amazing tribute to Abebe Bikila, who 50 years previously, over the same cobbled streets, won the 1960 Olympic marathon, having run the entire race in his bare feet.

“I felt I had to do something to honour Bikila,” Gena later said. “For me, he will always be an enormous inspiration. He gave me the strength to win this race. And I wanted to feel what it would be like to cross the line in Rome, barefoot, like he once did.”

It wasn’t an entirely incidental tribute. The organisers were offering a €5,000 bonus to the winner if he took off his shoes within the last 385 yards and crossed the finish line barefoot. This was their way of honouring Bikila, who will be forever associated with Rome, specifically that Olympic marathon of September 10th, 1960.

The first black African to win an Olympic gold – and the last time African distance running would go unheralded. Bikila didn’t so much occupy a turning point in the history of distance running. He was that turning point.

The story of Bikila has been told many times, but has become no less fascinating over the years. He’s been the subject of several books – including Barefoot Runner, by Paul Rambali, and Triumph and Tragedy, by his daughter, Tsige Bikila.

He was the star of Tokyo Olympiad, Kon Ichikawa’s film of the 1964 Olympics, where Bikila defended his marathon title (this time wearing shoes) and famously celebrated his win by performing a series of vigorous calisthenics. That footage of Bikila was recycled in Marathon Man, and remains the single most stirring piece of film footage in the history of marathon running.

“I remember he had unbelievably long arms,” my dad told me this week, when I stopped by to ask him his memories of Bikila. He also ran in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, and it turned out the Ethiopian team were housed in the apartment block directly across from the Irish.

“We’d see him every morning, and he’d be doing all this stretching, and exercises. We didn’t know what to make of it. We’d see him on the track as well, and he was deceptively quick. He’d do 20 times 300 metres, no trouble. We spoke a few times, but he kept to himself, really.

“Serious enough, actually. He had an incredible aura about him. He really did. I was a bit frightened of him. He had his Swedish coach around him the whole time as well. I forget his name now.”

He was Omni Niskanen, and is credited with discovering Bikila. Ethiopia had pre-war connections with Sweden, and in 1946 Niskanen took up an offer to teach physical education at the cadet school in Addis Ababa for officers destined for the emperor’s imperial bodyguard. Five years later, in 1951, a 19-year-old Bikila, the son of a shepherd, walked the 150 miles from the village of Jato to Addis Ababa and signed up as a cadet.

Niskanen was thoroughly knowledgeable of the training methods of the great Scandinavians, like Gunder Hagg and Paavo Nurmi, and promptly transferred it to his pupils such as Bikila, and a young Mamo Wolde.

Before 1960, before Niskanen, before Bikila, African distance running was nothing, going nowhere. In Ethiopia, and Kenya, it was incomprehensible that a runner could compete on the world stage, let alone dominate it. Bikila changed all that.

Wolde, his long-term training partner, went on to win the 1968 Olympic marathon, in Mexico City, the same year Kip Keino first staked Kenya’s claim on distance running by winning the 1,500 metres.

Murits Yifter, Haile Gebrselassie, Kenenisa Bekele and practically every other successful Ethiopian runner have all paid tribute to Bikila for showing them the way, for showing the rest of the world the true limits of distance running.

But what if there was no Niskanen? No barefoot runner who inspired not just a nation but an entire continent? What if Abebe Bikila had not been added to the Ethiopian team in 1960, at the last moment?

It’s a churlish argument, but some people believe the Ethiopians and Kenyans have killed distance running, spoiled it for everyone else. If everyone thought that way there’d have been no Sonia O’Sullivan, no Paula Radcliffe, no Catherina McKiernan.

The problem is, so many athletes and coaches believe the solution to the African dominance is not to run but to hide.

We’ll get the latest reminder of all this tomorrow at the 38th World Cross Country Championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Unless a few of their guys run the wrong way, Ethiopia or Kenya will win the senior team race, as they have done every year since 1981. Likewise, an African runner is certain to win the men’s individual title, as they have done every year since 1986.

The women are equally all-conquering, as Ethiopia and Kenya have won the senior team race every year since 1995, and every junior team race.

The great shame is that despite tomorrow’s World Cross Country being staged in Europe, the European interest is minimal. Ireland have sent two athletes: Linda Byrne of Dundrum in the senior race and John Travers from Donore in the junior – and both deserve great praise for running and not hiding. Several European countries haven’t bothered sending any athletes. The will to win has been replaced by the fear of losing.

“We’re pampered,” said Br Colm O’Connell, in an interview this week, explaining the difference between European and African runners. O’Connell has spent 34 years coaching Kenyan runners, and for him it’s not about genetics or diet or altitude training.

“When you stand on the start line, the guy from Iten will have the greater will to win, because he will have the greater pain threshold.”

Bikila would have agreed.

“The problem is, so many athletes and coaches believe the solution to the African dominance is not to run but to hide. If everyone thought that way there’d have been no Sonia O’Sullivan, no Paula Radcliffe, no Catherina McKiernan. Several European countries haven’t bothered sending any athletes