Somalia’s runners provide inspiration

Somalia’s runners provide inspiration

By Charles Robinson, Yahoo! Sports 8 hours, 40 minutes ago

Samia Yusuf Omar of Somalia re…

AP - Aug 18, 11:14 pm EDT

Olympics Gallery

Getting Smart in Beijing [i]Aug 20, 2008

Somalia’s runners provide inspiration Charles_robinson2

BEIJING – Samia Yusuf Omar headed back to Somalia
Sunday, returning to the small two-room house in Mogadishu shared by
seven family members. Her mother lives there, selling fruits and
vegetables. Her father is buried there, the victim of a wayward
artillery shell that hit their home and also killed Samia’s aunt and
uncle.
This is the Olympic story we never heard.
It’s about a girl whose Beijing moment lasted a mere 32 seconds –
the slowest 200-meter dash time out of the 46 women who competed in the
event. Thirty-two seconds that almost nobody saw but that she carries
home with her, swelled with joy and wonderment. Back to a decades-long
civil war that has flattened much of her city. Back to an Olympic
program with few Olympians and no facilities. Back to meals of flat
bread, wheat porridge and tap water.
“I have my pride,” she said through a translator before leaving China.
“This is the highest thing any athlete can hope for. It has been a very
happy experience for me. I am proud to bring the Somali flag to fly
with all of these countries, and to stand with the best athletes in the
world.”
There are many life stories that collide in each Olympics – many
intriguing tales of glory and tragedy. Beijing delivered the
electricity of Usain Bolt and the determination of Michael Phelps. It left hearts heavy with the disappointment of Liu Xiang and the heartache of Hugh McCutcheon.

But
it also gave us Samia Yusuf Omar – one small girl from one chaotic
country – and a story that might have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been
for a roaring half-empty stadium.

***
It was Aug. 19, and the tiny girl had crossed over seven lanes to
find her starting block in her 200-meter heat. She walked past
Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell-Brown
– the eventual gold medalist in the event. Samia had read about
Campbell-Brown in track and field magazines and once watched her in
wonderment on television. As a cameraman panned down the starting
blocks, it settled on lane No. 2, on a 17-year old girl with the frame
of a Kenyan distance runner. Samia’s biography in the Olympic media
system contained almost no information, other than her 5-foot-4,
119-pound frame. There was no mention of her personal best times and
nothing on previous track meets. Somalia, it was later explained, has a
hard time organizing the records of its athletes.
She looked so odd and out of place among her competitors, with her
white headband and a baggy, untucked T-shirt. The legs on her wiry
frame were thin and spindly, and her arms poked out of her sleeves like
the twigs of a sapling. She tugged at the bottom of her shirt and shot
an occasional nervous glance at the other runners in her heat. Each had
muscles bulging from beneath their skin-tight track suits. Many
outweighed Samia by nearly 40 pounds.
After introductions, she knelt into her starting block.
***
The country of Somalia sent two athletes to the Beijing Games –
Samia and distance runner Abdi Said Ibrahim, who competed in the men’s
5,000-meter event. Like Samia, Abdi finished last in his event,
overmatched by competitors who were groomed for their Olympic moment.
Somalia has only loose-knit programs supporting its Olympians, few
coaches, and few facilities. With a civil war tearing the city apart
since the Somali government’s collapse in 1991, Mogadishu Stadium has
become one of the bloodiest pieces of real estate in the city – housing
U.N. forces in the early 1990s and now a military compound for
insurgents.
That has left the country’s track athletes to train in Coni Stadium,
an artillery-pocked structure built in 1958 which has no track, endless
divots, and has been overtaken by weeds and plants.
“Sports are not a priority for Somalia,” said Duran Farah, vice
president of the Somali Olympic Committee. “There is no money for
facilities or training. The war, the security, the difficulties with
food and everything – there are just many other internal difficulties
to deal with.”

That leaves athletes such as Samia and 18-year old Abdi without the
normal comforts and structure enjoyed by almost every other athlete in
the Olympic Games. They don’t receive consistent coaching, don’t
compete in meets on a regular basis and struggle to find safety in
something as simple as going out for a daily run.
When Samia cannot make it to the stadium, she runs in the streets,
where she runs into roadblocks of burning tires and refuse set out by
insurgents. She is often bullied and threatened by militia or locals
who believe that Muslim women should not take part in sports. In hopes
of lessening the abuse, she runs in the oppressive heat wearing long
sleeves, sweat pants and a head scarf. Even then, she is told her place
should be in the home – not participating in sports.
“For some men, nothing is good enough,” Farah said.
Even Abdi faces constant difficulties, passing through military
checkpoints where he is shaken down for money. And when he has competed
in sanctioned track events, gun-toting insurgents have threatened his
life for what they viewed as compliance with the interim government.
“Once, the insurgents were very unhappy,” he said. “When we went
back home, my friends and I were rounded up and we were told if we did
it again, we would get killed. Some of my friends stopped being in
sports. I had many phone calls threatening me, that if I didn’t stop
running, I would get killed. Lately, I do not have these problems. I
think probably they realized we just wanted to be athletes and were not
involved with the government.”
But the interim government has not been able to offer support,
instead spending its cash and energy arming Ethiopian allies for the
fight against insurgents. Other than organizing a meet to compete for
Olympic selection – in which the Somali Olympic federation chose whom
it believed to be its two best performers – there has been little
lavished on athletes. While other countries pour millions into the
training and perfecting of their Olympic stars, Somalia offers little
guidance and no doctors, not even a stipend for food.
“The food is not something that is measured and given to us every day,” Samia said. “We eat whatever we can get.”
On the best days, that means getting protein from a small portion of
fish, camel or goat meat, and carbohydrates from bananas or citrus
fruits growing in local trees. On the worst days – and there are long
stretches of those – it means surviving on water and Angera, a flat
bread made from a mixture of wheat and barley.
“There is no grocery store,” Abdi said. “We can’t go shopping for whatever we want.”
He laughs at this thought, with a smile that is missing a front tooth.

***
When the gun went off in Samia’s 200-meter heat, seven women blasted
from their starting blocks, registering as little as 16 one-hundredths
of a second of reaction time. Samia’s start was slow enough that the
computer didn’t read it, leaving her reaction time blank on the heat’s
statistical printout.
Within seconds, seven competitors were thundering around the curve
in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, struggling to separate themselves from one
another. Samia was just entering the curve when her opponents were
nearing the finish line. A local television feed had lost her entirely
by the time Veronica Campbell-Brown crossed the finish line in a
trotting 23.04 seconds.
As the athletes came to a halt and knelt, stretching and sucking
deep breaths, a camera moved to ground level. In the background of the
picture, a white dot wearing a headband could be seen coming down the
stretch.
***
Until this month, Samia had been to two countries outside of her own – Djibouti and Ethiopia. Asked how she will describe Beijing, her eyes get big and she snickers from under a blue and white Olympic baseball cap.
“The stadiums, I never thought something like this existed in the
world,” she said. “The buildings in the city, it was all very
surprising. It will probably take days to finish all the stories we
have to tell.”
Asked about Beijing’s otherworldly Water Cube, she lets out a sigh: “Ahhhhhhh.”
Before she can answer, Abdi cuts her off.
“I didn’t know what it was when I saw it,” he said. “Is it plastic? Is it magic?”
Few buildings are beyond two or three stories tall in Mogadishu, and
those still standing are mostly in tatters. Only pictures will be able
to describe some of Beijing’s structures, from the ancient architecture
of the Forbidden City to the modernity of the Water Cube and the Bird’s
Nest.
“The Olympic fire in the stadium, everywhere I am, it is always up
there,” Samia said. “It’s like the moon. I look up wherever I go, it is
there.”
These are the stories they will relish when they return to Somalia,
which they believe has, for one brief moment, united the country’s
warring tribes. Farah said he had received calls from countrymen all
over the world, asking how their two athletes were doing and what they
had experienced in China. On the morning of Samia’s race, it was just
after 5 a.m., and locals from her neighborhood were scrambling to find
a television with a broadcast.
“People stayed awake to see it,” Farah said. “The good thing, sports is the one thing which unites all of Somalia.”
That is one of the common threads they share with every athlete at
the Games. Just being an Olympian and carrying the country’s flag
brings an immense sense of pride to families and neighborhoods which
typically know only despair.
A pride that Samia will share with her mother, three brothers and
three sisters. A pride that Abdi will carry home to his father, two
brothers and two sisters. Like Samia’s father two years ago, Abdi’s
mother was killed in the civil war, by a mortar shell that hit the
family’s home in 1993.
“We are very proud,” Samia said. “Because of us, the Somali flag is
raised among all the other nations’ flags. You can’t imagine how proud
we were when we were marching in the Opening Ceremonies with the flag.
“Despite the difficulties and everything we’ve had with our country, we feel great pride in our accomplishment.”
***
As Samia came down the stretch in her 200-meter heat, she realized
that the Somalian Olympic federation had chosen to place her in the
wrong event. The 200 wasn’t nearly the best event for a middle distance
runner. But the federation believed the dash would serve as a “good
experience” for her. Now she was coming down the stretch alone, pumping
her arms and tilting her head to the side with a look of despair.
Suddenly, the half-empty stadium realized there was still a runner
on the track, still pushing to get across the finish line almost eight
seconds behind the seven women who had already completed the race. In
the last 50 meters, much of the stadium rose to its feet, flooding the
track below with cheers of encouragement. A few competitors who had
left Samia behind turned and watched it unfold.
As Samia crossed the line in 32.16 seconds, the crowd roared in applause. Bahamian runner Sheniqua Ferguson,
the next smallest woman on the track at 5-foot-7 and 130 pounds, looked
at the girl crossing the finish and thought to herself, “Wow, she’s
tiny.”
“She must love running,” Ferguson said later.
***
Several days later, Samia waved off her Olympic moment as being
inspirational. While she was still filled with joy over her chance to
compete, and though she knew she had done all she could, part of her
seemed embarrassed that the crowd had risen to its feet to help push
her across the finish line.
“I was happy the people were cheering and encouraging me,” she said.
“But I would have liked to be cheered because I won, not because I
needed encouragement. It is something I will work on. I will try my
best not to be the last person next time. It was very nice for people
to give me that encouragement, but I would prefer the winning cheer.
She shrugged and smiled.
“I knew it was an uphill task.”
And there it was. While the Olympics are often promoted for the
fastest and strongest and most agile champions, there is something to
be said for the ones who finish out of the limelight. The ones who
finish last and leave with their pride.
At their best, the Olympics still signify competition and purity, a
love for sport. What represents that better than two athletes who carry
their country’s flag into the Games despite their country’s inability
to carry them before that moment? What better way to find the best of
the Olympic spirit than by looking at those who endure so much that
would break it?
“We know that we are different from the other athletes,” Samia said.
“But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like all the
rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other
competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But more than
anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our
country.”
She smiles when she says this, sitting a stone’s throw from a
Somalian flag that she and her countryman Abdi brought to these Games.
They came and went from Beijing largely unnoticed, but may have been
the most dignified example these Olympics could offer.

» Getting back to business in Somalia
» Profile: Somalia's Islamic Courts
» Tales of Inspiration