The Longest Run: Olympics about more than winning for Refugee team
They ran. So goes the first act of a refugee: a scramble for food or clothing, a grab of the nearest helping hand, flight. Were the soldiers coming to take territory? Coming for forced conscripts the way they did two years before, when Yiech Pur Biel’s father ran and never came back? In those first moments it didn’t matter; the soldiers were coming. So Biel and his mother, two sisters and younger brother rushed out of their home, five more drops in the human flood rushing into the scrubby forest outside the town of Nasir, in the northeast of what would soon become South Sudan.
This was 2005. What month? Biel doesn’t remember. What season? He can’t say. He was 10 then, an age when time means little but the loss of home feels like the earth cracking. "When they attacked us," he says, "I saw it was the end of my life with my family."
It got worse. Biel—who would grow up intent on proving, along with the nine other members of the Refugee Olympic Team at the Rio Games, that refugees “are not animals”—then took what is often the next step. He lived like an animal. Hiding in the bush, senses on high alert, no food to be had. For three days his family, sleepless, bellies screaming, foraged for fruit and climbed trees for their bitter leaves.
Finally Biel's mother, Nyagony, made a decision. The border with Ethiopia was only 19 miles away, a week's walk; maybe they could get food there. Biel was the oldest boy. There was no avoiding the cruel calculus: She could handle three children on the road but not four. "You see," Biel says, "if I am 10 years, I can survive without her, maybe."
He tried to understand. His mother placed him with a woman from their neighborhood, gathered his brother and sisters and went. So began the refugee's third, most wrenching act, the separation endured worldwide, in some form, by more than 21 million refugees and another 44 million forcibly displaced people. Biel has not spoken to his mother and siblings since then. He doesn't know if they survived the trek, the soldiers, the years.
While relating all this in July, during a break at the Tegla Loroupe Training Center in Ngong, Kenya, about 14 miles outside Nairobi, the 21-year-old Biel speaks in a high monotone, his face giving away nothing. He says he cried the day his mother left him, but it wasn't his worst moment. That came after, when he went with the neighbor lady and her two children back to Nasir and found his hometown in ashes. "They burned everything," he says of the soldiers. "There was nothing: The village has gone. They took animals, even killed some. The army go away. All that remained were the dead people."
That's when Biel knew: He was lost. The neighbor lady would be going now, surely, and he was terrified that she, too, would do the math, “turn against me” and leave him behind. “I thought it was my end,” he says. So for the next 24 hours, one full day, the boy waited for his dying to begin.
When International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach announced the 10 members of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team in June—after a yearlong global vetting by 17 national Olympic committees and the United Nations Refugee Agency and after countless tryouts in Europe and Africa that resembled nothing so much as the hunt for Willy Wonka's golden tickets—he clearly intended the impact to redound far beyond sports. “A symbol of hope to all the refugees in our world,” Bach called the squad. “It is also a signal to the international community that refugees are our fellow human beings and are an enrichment to society.
“These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. We will offer them a home in the Olympic Village together with all the athletes of the world.”
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