FOOT SOLDIER: Running without shoes, Bikila, an Imperial Guardsman in Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s court, pulls ahead in the 1960 Rome marathon

[Popperfoto/Getty]
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By SIMON ROBINSON
A few of the other runners sniggered when they saw Abebe Bikila turn up at the start of the Olympic marathon with no shoes. As a television camera scanned the scrum of athletes readying themselves for the starter’s gun, a commentator asked: “And what’s this Ethiopian called?” It was 1960, Rome. Africa was just shrugging off the weight of colonial rule and some sporting officials still doubted Africans were ready for the big time. A little over 2 hr. 15 min. later that myth lay shattered by the slight man wearing number 11, a member of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard and a proud African whose gliding, barefoot run through Rome’s cobblestone streets announced his continent’s emergence as a running powerhouse.

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.

For 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 at the age of 41.

Two new 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 a rush of excitement and joy.

Tim 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. But if you’re comfortable with a biographer cutting some corners and finessing some facts, then Rambali’s book is by far the more inspiring read.