Barefoot in Rome

Night had fallen over Rome. Along the ancient Appian Way, soldiers held up flaming torches, and the old stones of the road glowed orange in the dark. Two runners came out of the shadows, side by side, breathing hard. They had been running for more than two hours.

One of them was a slim young man from Ethiopia. His feet made almost no sound on the stones, because he had no shoes on.

The shepherd's son

Abebe Bikila was born in 1932 in a small village in the highlands of Ethiopia, in East Africa. By a strange coincidence, he was born on the same day that the Olympic marathon was being run in Los Angeles, on the other side of the world.

His father was a shepherd, and the family was poor. As a boy, Abebe looked after animals in the hills, walking and running for miles over rough ground at high altitude, where the air is thin.

When he was a young man, he moved to the capital, Addis Ababa, and joined the Imperial Bodyguard, the soldiers who protected the Emperor, Haile Selassie. It was a steady job, and it meant he could send help home to his family.

A coach from Sweden

In 1956, Abebe watched Ethiopia's athletes come home from the Olympic Games in Melbourne, marching in their national uniforms. He felt a strong wish to wear that uniform himself.

He began to train seriously. The Ethiopian government had hired a Swedish coach, Onni Niskanen, to build up the country's athletics. Niskanen noticed the quiet guardsman who could run and run without seeming to tire. He trained him carefully, with long runs in the hills around Addis Ababa, often in bare feet.

Even so, when the team for the 1960 Olympics in Rome was chosen, Abebe was not the first choice. Only when another runner, Wami Biratu, was injured shortly before the Games did Abebe get his place.

No shoes that fit

In Rome, the team went to find running shoes for the marathon. The shoes on offer did not fit Abebe well, and they gave him blisters. With his coach, he made a simple decision. He would run the way he had trained: barefoot.

The marathon that year was unusual. It started in the late afternoon and finished after dark, so that the runners could avoid the worst of the heat. The course passed many of Rome's ancient monuments and ended beneath the Arch of Constantine.

There was another reason the race mattered. In the 1930s, when Abebe was a small child, Italy had invaded Ethiopia and occupied it for several years. Now an Ethiopian soldier was running through the streets of the Italian capital.

The torchlit road

Abebe ran calmly near the front. As darkness fell, only one other runner was left with him: Rhadi Ben Abdesselam of Morocco. For mile after mile, they ran together along the torchlit Appian Way.

Near the end, Abebe pulled away. His bare feet kept their steady rhythm, and he crossed the finish line under the great stone arch, alone, in a new world best time. Then, while the other runners collapsed, he began to do gentle stretching exercises on the grass, as if he could have kept going.

Abebe Bikila was the first Black African ever to win an Olympic gold medal. Back home, Ethiopia celebrated wildly. He was promoted in the Bodyguard and became a national hero overnight. Across Africa, people who had lived for years under foreign rule saw in him a sign of what they, too, could achieve.

Tokyo, and a new road

Four years later, at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, Abebe ran the marathon again, this time in shoes. Only weeks before, he had been in hospital having his appendix removed. Few people thought he could even finish.

He won by a wide margin, in another world best. He was the first person ever to win the Olympic marathon twice.

In 1969, Abebe was badly hurt in a car accident near Addis Ababa. He was left paralysed and would never run again. It was a cruel blow for a man whose life had been running.

But he did not give up on sport. Using a wheelchair, he took part in archery and other events at international games for athletes with disabilities. He showed the same quiet determination he had shown on the roads of Rome.

Abebe Bikila died in 1973, aged forty-one. Tens of thousands of people came to his funeral in Addis Ababa.

Many great runners from Ethiopia and East Africa have followed him since. All of them run, in a way, along the road he opened, one bare footstep at a time.

Want to read more?

Tim Judah's Bikila: Ethiopia's Barefoot Olympian and Paul Rambali's Barefoot Runner tell his life in full. His Olympic results are listed on Olympics.com, the official site of the International Olympic Committee.