Abebe Bikila

Abebe Bikila: Barefoot Past the Colosseum

On the night of 10 September 1960, an Ethiopian corporal in the Imperial Bodyguard ran through Rome without shoes, overtook the Moroccan Rhadi Ben Abdesselam in the last 500 metres, and crossed the line at the Arch of Constantine in 2:15:16.2 — a world record. Then, having just run a marathon barefoot on paved Roman roads, he began touching his toes and jogging on the spot. He said afterwards that he could have run another ten or fifteen kilometres. The course had passed the obelisk of Axum, looted from Ethiopia by the Italian army that had occupied his country during his childhood. He was the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

Jato

Abebe Bikila was born on 7 August 1932 in Jato, in the Selale district of Shewa, to Wudinesh Beneberu and Demissie. His birthday fell on the day of the Los Angeles Olympic marathon, a coincidence too neat for fiction. During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-37 the family fled to the remote town of Gorro, returning afterwards to farm.

As a boy he played gena, a traditional Ethiopian long-distance hockey game whose goalposts stand kilometres apart — a sport that amounts to running all day while chasing something. He grew up at high altitude, and would later run twenty kilometres a day between Sululta and Addis Ababa simply as a matter of getting to work.

The Imperial Guard

Around 1952 he moved to Addis Ababa and joined the 5th Infantry Regiment of the Imperial Guard, the elite division that protected Emperor Haile Selassie. He served with the Kagnew Battalion during the Korean War and would eventually reach the rank of shambel, captain.

It was on those daily runs into the capital, in the mid-1950s, that Onni Niskanen, a Swedish coach employed by the Ethiopian government, noticed him. Niskanen took him on and trained him specifically for the marathon. In 1956 Abebe finished second to Wami Biratu in the Armed Forces championship. In July 1960 he won his first marathon in Addis Ababa, and a month later ran 2:21:23 — faster than Emil Zátopek's Olympic record. The Rome campaign, as his biographer Tim Judah put it, was "a long planned operation," not an accident.

Rome, Without Shoes

The barefoot detail, which made him globally famous, was a contingency rather than a statement: new shoes had given him blisters, so he ran without them. He had grown up running unshod and knew what he was doing. He beat Ben Abdesselam by twenty-five seconds and the world record by eight tenths of a second.

Haile Selassie awarded him the Star of Ethiopia, promoted him to corporal, and gave him a house and a chauffeur-driven Volkswagen Beetle. The following year he won the Athens Classical Marathon barefoot — the last time he ever raced that way — and took Osaka and Košice as well. At the 1963 Boston Marathon, cold wind and the Newton hills beat him into fifth place in 2:24:43: the only international marathon he ever finished without winning.

Tokyo, Forty Days After Surgery

On 16 September 1964 he had his appendix removed. He was back in training within days. On 21 October, wearing Puma shoes, he won the Tokyo Olympic marathon in 2:12:11.2, four minutes and eight seconds ahead of the silver medallist Basil Heatley — the first runner ever to successfully defend an Olympic marathon title.

And again he did not look tired. He performed calisthenics on the infield, touched his toes twice, lay down and cycled his legs in the air. Selassie promoted him to lieutenant and gave him the Order of Menelik II, another Beetle and another house.

The Body Gives Out

He won a second Mainichi Marathon in May 1965 and took Zarautz and Incheon-Seoul in 1966; the Korean race was the last marathon he ever completed. At Zarautz in July 1967 he tore a hamstring and never recovered from it. In July 1968 he went to Germany for treatment of circulatory problems in his legs, and the German government declined to pay for it.

He entered the Mexico City marathon on 20 October 1968 wearing bib number 1, chasing a third consecutive gold, with a fractured fibula that doctors had found a week earlier. He dropped out at about sixteen kilometres. His countryman Mamo Wolde won.

The Accident

On 22 March 1969 he lost control of the Volkswagen Beetle the emperor had given him. The car overturned and trapped him; Judah suggests he may have been drinking, while Abebe said he had swerved to avoid an oncoming car. He was cut free the following morning.

He was quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down, and never walked again. On 29 March he was flown to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in England for eight months of treatment. Queen Elizabeth II visited him; get-well cards arrived from around the world. He recovered enough movement to be classified paraplegic, with the use of his arms.

And then he competed again. In 1970 he trained for wheelchair archery and entered archery and table tennis at the Stoke Mandeville Wheelchair Games in London, the forerunner of the Paralympics. In April 1971, at a competition for disabled athletes in Norway, he won the cross-country sleigh-riding event in 1:16:17. At the 1972 Munich Olympics he was a special guest and received a standing ovation at the opening ceremony; after Frank Shorter was given the marathon gold, Shorter came over and shook his hand.

He died in Addis Ababa on 25 October 1973, aged 41, of a cerebral haemorrhage — a complication of the crash four years earlier. An estimated 65,000 people attended his state funeral, Haile Selassie among them, and the emperor declared a national day of mourning. He lies in a tomb with a bronze statue at Saint Joseph Church.

Why Abebe Is Called a Genius

This is a case that rests on physical craft rather than intellect, and it would be dishonest to dress it otherwise. Abebe wrote nothing, theorised nothing, and left no method behind him except an example. What he had was an extraordinary aerobic engine built by altitude and by two decades of running that was never intended as training — gena as a child, twenty kilometres a day to work as a soldier — combined with a pacing judgment that is the closest thing distance running has to intelligence. Twice he ran a marathon inside a plan and executed it exactly: passing Ben Abdesselam with 500 metres left, not 5,000, and winning Tokyo by more than four minutes forty days after abdominal surgery.

The more telling quality is a kind of physiological composure. His post-race calisthenics in Rome and Tokyo were not showmanship; they were evidence that he had finished the fastest marathons ever run with reserve in hand. That is a rarer thing than raw speed.

The honest counter-case is that his barefoot fame was partly accident — he ran without shoes in Rome because a new pair had blistered him — and that his career was short and physically fragile: one hamstring injury in 1967 ended his competitive marathon running for good. His talent was not exportable as knowledge, and he did not coach or systematise it. But the sport itself has drawn the line from him: Sports Illustrated's Kenny Moore credited him with starting "the great African distance running avalanche," and East African dominance of the event has held for six decades.

Legacy

The New York Road Runners created the Abebe Bikila Award five years after his death; Mamo Wolde, Tegla Loroupe, Paul Tergat and Haile Gebrselassie have all received it. A stadium in Addis Ababa bears his name. At the Rome Marathon's fiftieth anniversary in 2010, the winner Siraj Gena ran the last 300 metres barefoot and collected a €5,000 bonus for it. In December 2019 the Olympic ring he lost in a Tokyo stadium bathroom in 1964 was returned to his family by the son of the attendant who had taken it — a small, late act of restitution to a man who was owed a great many.