Word: bikila
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...summit of the Colorado mountain. Record times have fallen from close to three hours a century ago to close to two hours today, with Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie setting the current record in Berlin last year with a time of 2 hr. 3 min. 59 sec. (A fellow Ethiopian, Abebe Bikila, won worldwide acclaim after setting a record at the 1960 Olympics in Rome - running barefoot - and another in Tokyo four years later wearing shoes.) Radcliffe, the 2008 New York winner, set the women's record in 2003, breaking the tape in London in 2 hr. 15 min. 25 sec. (Read...
...Bikila's triumph was all the more stunning because it happened in the capital of Ethiopia's former military occupier. Legend has it that he made his decisive move in the race just as he passed the Axum Obelisk, a towering stela that Mussolini had brought back from Ethiopia as war loot. Four years later in Tokyo, Bikila won gold again, the first man to defend his Olympic marathon title. This time he wore shoes...
...such a pivotal figure in sports history, not much is known about Bikila. Perhaps there is little to know. A poor villager who faithfully served the Emperor and was coached by a charismatic Swede named Onni Niskanen, Bikila left neither piles of letters nor much insight into his own dreams and beliefs. After his twin marathon wins, filled with hubris and alcohol, his body betrayed him. He failed in Mexico in '68, was paralyzed in a car accident and died a few years later...
...books about the runner tackle in very different ways the paucity of behind-the-scenes substance and the absence of telling interviews with the man himself. In Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila, former rock journalist Paul Rambali weaves a powerful narrative through a series of vignettes. The book, just out in paperback, makes liberal use of fictionalizing devices - interior monologues, imagined conversations - that render it less reliable as a historical account, but help to capture the drama of Bikila's life. It's hard to read Rambali's well-paced description of the Rome race without...
...Judah's Bikila: Ethiopia's Barefoot Olympian is a more straightforward version of the same tale. Though Judah, a veteran foreign correspondent who knows Africa well, offers us plenty of solid reporting, his account struggles to overcome the dearth of rich source material even as it gets bogged down in some of the details the author has managed to dig up. At its best - in Judah's description of the Rome race, and in providing context that explains the wider importance of Bikila's victory - the book is a valuable addition to the history of running and Africa...