BEIJING AND THE STORY THE IOC DOES NOT WANT TOLD
The Times
July 19, 2008
Owen Slot It is important that we tell you the story of Lopez Lomong
now because in a month’s time, when the Beijing Games are under way,
the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the guardian of the Games,
will not be so keen on it.
For when Lomong was 6 and attending mass in his village in the south
of Sudan, it was invaded by a government-backed militia and he,
along with a number of his peers, were abducted and taken away to
a camp to be trained as soldiers. His journey, from 1991, when he
was in the hands of the militia and those around him were dying of
dysentery and malnutrition, to the start line of the 1,500 metres in
Beijing next month is the most amazing, tragic and uplifting story.
You could scream it from the Great Wall of China and shout about the
miracle of sport and the Olympics – about how Lomong escaped from
the militia and found his way to a refugee camp in Kenya and about
how, when he and his friends, the "Lost Boys", had been in the camp
for nine years and ran five miles one day in 2000 to see the Sydney
Olympics on a black-and-white television, where they saw Michael
Johnson win the 400 metres. Lomong said to himself that day that he
wanted to run like that man.
The problem with Lomong’s story, however, is that the scars of his
extraordinary lif e have not healed. How could they? He spent most
of his life under the impression that his parents and siblings were
dead. They thought the same of him and when he eventually found them
again they showed him the grave they had made for him more than a
decade earlier.
So when Lomong gets to Beijing there will be two subjects about which
he feels extremely strongly. One is that he can put his heart and soul
and every straining sinew into representing the country of his choice,
the United States, and the other is that he may be able to talk freely
about Sudan and how the Government that backed the militia that ripped
him from his family is doing the same in the Darfur region today and
that that Government buys its arms from China in exchange for oil.
When Lomong was 16 he won a place on a resettlement scheme and was sent
to live with a family near Syracuse in New York. Seven years later he
has qualified for the Olympics and at the US trials he talked about
Darfur and his grave concern for the nation he left behind.
One way for Lomong to express his view has been to join Team Darfur,
a group of nearly 400 international sportsmen and women who are
using the Beijing Games as a platform from which to urge China to
act to help the Sudan crisis. Around the Olympics venues in Beijing,
however, Lomong will not be allowed to wear a Team Darfur T-shirt or
wristband because the gui delines of the IOC on political propaganda
forbid it. Even when in his room in the Olympic village he will be
discouraged from displaying Team Darfur material. In following these
guidelines, Lomong is being forced, during the Games, to suspend the
truth of his past.
Until a fortnight ago the kind of story that the IOC found infinitely
more palatable was that of Mahbooba Ahadgar, an Afghan woman who was
due to run the 1,500 metres in Beijing in a headscarf and a tracksuit
to cover her skin. A devout Muslim competing proudly in the Games,
she was such poster-girl material that she was made the beneficiary
of an Olympic Solidarity scholarship and was sent abroad to prepare
at international training camps.
The fact that Ahadgar was not even a long-shot medal chance did not
seem to matter. In an event run over three laps she would nearly
have been lapped by the winner. But that did not stop her becoming
an Olympic toast until, at the same time that Lomong was qualifying
for the Games, she was secretly checking out of her training camp
in Italy and making a run for it, setting off for Norway to ask for
political asylum.
This was not the first time an Olympic Solidarity scholar has gone
Awol. At the World Amateur Boxing Championships in Chicago last
year two Ugandans and an Armenian were lost. Certain people within
the IAAF, the governing body of world athletics, are furious about
Ahadgar because last year they lost two Bangladeshis who were also
nowhere near world-leading standards.
This is not to say that the Olympic Solidarity scholarships, which
fund athletes from developing nations, are a sham. In the four years
up to Beijing, more than 1,000 athletes have been funded to the tune
of $16 million (about £8 million). At the Athens Olympics four years
ago 583 scholars competed, of whom 54 won medals – and hats off to
all of them and the fact that Olympic money helped sport to help
these people to change their lives.
Yet one of the elements in its mission statement tells us that Olympic
Solidarity is about "the promotion of a society concerned with human
dignity and peace" and there can barely be a better description of the
aims of Lomong and Team Darfur – the very aims the Olympic Movement
is contriving to stifle.
Another element of the statement is that Olympic Solidarity is about
"international co-operation, cultural exchanges, the development of
sport and its educational aspects", which would appear to explain
Ahadgar and the Bangladeshis and the way they were promoted beyond
their capabilities and directed, like missionaries, in the direction
of the Beijing Games.
Yet Ahadgar was not a world-class athlete and she elected to leave her
country rather than represent it. By using – or attempting to use –
her, or people like her, to boost the impression of the20Olympics as
this all-enveloping, multicultural phenomenon, the IOC is guilty of
propaganda of its own.
There are two pictures here. One comes slightly distorted and
airbrushed and will be squeezed into a frame by the IOC and its
Chinese hosts in Beijing.
The other is a portrait of Lomong. Which would you rather have on
the wall?
After Lomong had qualified for the Games, he gave an interview in
which he talked about the two central pillars in his life: his running
and his background. "I came a long way, for sure," he said. "From
running through the wilderness to save my life, now I am doing this
for fun." What a statement about sport. What an Olympian triumph that
the Beijing Games and its hosts will be utterly unable to embrace.
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