Out of Thin Air by Michael Crawley

Author:Michael Crawley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472975317
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

8

To Win in Rome Would be Like Winning 1,000 Times

Abebe Bikila is running past the Axum obelisk, the patter of his bare feet, which has accompanied him for an hour and 45 minutes, now lost in the noise from the crowds lining the road. Darkness is falling and the sampietrini, the bevelled stones of black basalt on which he runs, have cooled noticeably. ‘In Africa, this is the hour when the animals drink,’ says the BBC commentator, vacuously, and this is not Africa, but Rome. Abebe is running at a pace of five minutes 10 seconds per mile, in red shorts and a simple cotton vest given to him at the training ground of Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial guard in Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa. He wears no watch, however, and has no way of knowing how fast he is travelling or how far behind him the other runners are. His gaze is impassive and steady. Onni Niskanen, the Swedish army major who Haile Selassie put in charge of his training, has told him to make his bid for victory here, at the Axum monument.

It is Saturday, 10 September, 1960. Earlier in the evening, as he warmed up in a swirling mass of bodies in the cloisters of a church, he had made the decision to remove his shoes. Not to prove anything to anyone, or to show that Africans needed nothing in order to win, but because he felt he would run better barefoot. He wrote the numbers of the competitors he thought he needed to be wary of on the back of his hand. Sixty-nine for Popov from the Soviet Union. Twenty-six for Rhadi the Moroccan, a fellow soldier. He thought about what Haile Selassie had said to him before he left: ‘To win in Rome would be like winning a thousand times over.’

The Axum monument, where Abebe makes his bid for victory, is a 24- metre tall obelisk that was built during the fourth century by subjects of the Kingdom of Axum, an ancient Ethiopian civilisation. In 1937 after Mussolini’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, it was taken from the city of Axum in the Tigray region as war booty by the Italian Fascists, cut into five pieces and transported to Rome. When the monument was finally flown back to Ethiopia in 2005 the runway at Axum had to be extended specially to allow it to land. At the time it was the biggest and heaviest piece of airfreight ever transported. Its symbolism on this occasion is no less huge. When the Ethiopians fought off the first Italian invasion in 1896 they did so barefoot and without guns, against a boot-wearing, heavily armed Italian force. Here, once more, is a barefoot Ethiopian defeating better-equipped opposition and doing so at a moment of incredible historical significance. No fewer than nine African countries gain their independence during the Olympic Games themselves, between August and September 1960. The Rome Olympics are also the first to be widely televised, so a large global audience is able to witness the first gold medal be won by a sub-Saharan African.

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