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This has nothing whatever to do with Ds, but

I thought it was a neat story. KathyR

Somalia’s runners provide inspiration

By

, Yahoo! Sports 9 hours, 38 minutes ago

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Samia Yusuf of Somalia re…

AP - Aug 18, 11:14 pm EDT

Olympics

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Getting

Smart in Beijing Aug

20, 2008

BEIJING – Samia

Yusuf 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

Phelps. It left hearts heavy with the disappointment of Liu

Xiang and the heartache of Hugh McCutcheon.

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But it also gave us Samia Yusuf – 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

-Brown – the eventual gold medalist in the event. Samia had

read about -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

-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.

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