Book Review: Bikila – Ethiopia's Barefoot Olympian

Considering the well-known achievements of the Ethiopian distance runners over the past fifty years or so, one is perhaps entitled to lament the lack of interest in the history of Ethiopian athletics.

While scholars have tackled innumerable Ethiopian issues in their sophisticated monographs, not a single learned paper has been dedicated to the athletes and their impact on the surrounding society.

In fact, the story of Ethiopian running is so poorly understood that the following claim can be found on the Ethiopian Athletics Federation website: “Although the exact roots of Ethiopian athletics cannot be retraced accurately, it is widely believed that the sport was widely practiced in schools and the military before 1897.”

Across the border in Kenya, the colonialists did not manage to create any support for modern sports until well into the 20th century. Yet we are to believe that Ethiopians happily adopted and mastered the jumping, throwing and running events during Emperor Menelik’s reign!

Thanks to an English journalist, the historiography of Ethiopian athletics can finally be taken seriously. Tim Judah’s Bikila – Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian (2008) is nominally a biography of Abebe Bikila, the 1960 and 1964 Olympic marathon champion. At the same time it is the most reliable account ever published on the origins of athletics in this country.

As a Finnish historian with a long-standing interest in Ethiopian running, I have been privileged to meet and interview many first-generation athletes, such as Mamo Wolde and Said Mussa, both of them deceased by now, and, of course, Wami Biratu, the ninety-year-old monument of Ethiopian sports. Not surprisingly, they all feature in Tim Judah’s text, but what is most striking about the book is the extent to which it succeeds in reconstructing the life of the founding father of Ethiopian athletics.

Although he was born in Finland, Onni Niskanen carried a Swedish passport when he arrived in Addis Ababa with hundreds of other civilian and military experts in the late 1940s. Unlike most expatriates, he devoted the rest of his life to Ethiopia, and while he busied himself with a number of humanitarian projects, he is best known as the coach of Abebe Bikila.

In 1950, Niskanen was put in charge of the Ministry of Education’s physical education department. Gradually, modern sports took root in the peasant society that Ethiopia was; and simultaneously, as the Imperial Bodyguard’s sports instructor, Niskanen cultivated the raw talent of Abebe, Wami and others.

The romantic notion of Ethiopians as natural runners will probably never die. Judging by Tim Judah’s book, however, it can surely be termed as a myth. “When I started training him, he ran like a drilling soldier,” Niskanen wrote about Abebe. Apart from disciplining their bodies, Niskanen subjected his athletes to thoroughly modern training regimes. The elite runners of this country were professional sportsmen in all but name.

Ironically, some of their rivals in the West were handicapped by the amateur ethos which still prevailed in the 1950s.

In that sense there was nothing accidental about Abebe Bikila’s first Olympic triumph in 1960. On the other hand, what may well have been accidental about Abebe was the fact that he won any gold medals at all.

Wami Biratu was generally considered as the leading Ethiopian runner in 1960, but due to an illness, he could not participate in the Rome games. Four years later Mamo Wolde was expected to challenge Abebe in Tokyo, but a leg injury forced him to pull out of the marathon. Mamo had to wait for his golden moment until 1968.

What actually counts in sport is, of course, the result sheet, and that is why Abebe Bikila will always be remembered as the greatest marathon runner of his generation. Accordingly, Onni Niskanen deserves to be acknowledged as the architect of his success, or, to quote Tim Judah’s solemn turn of phrase, as “a man who changed the history of sport”.

The author has carried out extensive interviews in Ethiopia, Sweden and many other countries. Niskanen “cared for Abebe like a baby, taking care of his massage, food, sleep,” an informant of Judah’s explains the two men’s relationship.

After the 1964 games, however, Abebe started frequenting bars and behaving more like a serial lover than a purposeful athlete. One of his girlfriends owned a restaurant. She also “had a record player and they would play the music of Tilahun Gessesse”.

Tilahun had served as a guardsman, too, and one is tempted to imagine him running alongside Abebe, sharing a joke with Mamo, and trying his hand at tennis with Wami. Sadly, Tilahun is no longer with us, but as was said at his funeral, his songs will reverberate in every Ethiopian’s heart.

Unlike singers, athletes need eloquent scribes to reach immortality, and Tim Judah has done more than that. His portrait of Abebe is alluring yet unflattering, and it provides a consistently informative history of the formative years of Ethiopian athletics.