Abebe Bikila
1932 – 1973 · Ethiopia
Known for: Olympic marathon champion who won in Rome barefoot and defended the title in Tokyo
“He ran barefoot into Rome and opened the road that East Africa has followed ever since.”
Biography
Abebe Bikila was born on 7 August 1932 in Jato, a small settlement in the Selale district of Shewa, in the highlands of central Ethiopia. The Second Italo-Ethiopian War drove his family to the remote town of Gorro during his childhood, and they later returned to farm near their old home. As a boy he played gena, a traditional long distance hockey game whose goals could stand kilometres apart. Around 1952, after moving to Addis Ababa, he enlisted in the 5th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Guard, the elite division that protected the emperor, and he later served with the Kagnew Battalion during the Korean War. In the mid 1950s he ran the twenty kilometres from the hills of Sululta down to the capital and back each day, until Onni Niskanen, a Swedish coach hired to train the guard, noticed him and began preparing him for the marathon.
Niskanen entered him for the marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics. The shoes Abebe bought in the city fitted badly and raised blisters, so he ran the race barefoot. To escape the heat the marathon began late in the afternoon at the foot of the Capitoline Hill and finished after dark at the Arch of Constantine, the last stretch of the Appian Way lit by soldiers holding torches. Abebe pulled clear with the Moroccan Rhadi Ben Abdesselam and sprinted away in the final five hundred metres to win in 2:15:16.2, a world best and the first Olympic gold medal won by an Ethiopian. Four years later in Tokyo, weeks after surgery to remove his appendix, he won again in world record time and became the first athlete to defend the Olympic marathon title.
A car accident on 22 March 1969 left Abebe paralysed. He regained some movement in the upper body but never walked again, and he took up the sports still open to him: while under treatment in England he competed in archery and table tennis at the 1970 Stoke Mandeville Games, an early forerunner of the Paralympic Games, and at a competition for disabled athletes in Norway in 1971 he won the cross country sleigh riding event. He died on 25 October 1973 at the age of 41, of a cerebral haemorrhage related to his injuries. He was given a state funeral and Emperor Haile Selassie declared a day of national mourning. Schools, races and the stadium in Addis Ababa that carries his name keep his memory, and the East African runners who came after him followed a road he was the first to open.