TOKYO
OLYMPICS
88 Time July 19/July 26, 2021Off
Track
THE REFUGEE OLYMPIC TEAM
WAS CREATED TO OFFER
HOPE. SOME ATHLETES ARE
RUNNING AWAY FROM IT
BY VIVIENNE WALTne day in Spring 2019, more Than
2,880 runners competed in a 10-km
race in Geneva. It was a regular event
on the athletic calendar, but this
time with a striking result. The winner was an
orphaned refugee from South Sudan, exiled in
Kenya, who had laced up his first pair of running
shoes only a few years earlier. Atop the podium,
clutching a bouquet of flowers and a trophy,
Dominic Lokinyomo Lobalu grinned with
delight. “I am very happy to have won today,”
he said. “I am going back to even more intense
training when I return to Kenya.”
But Lobalu did not go back. Later that day,
he would ask about the prize money he assumed
he had won. His questions were directed to
the managers who had traveled with him to
Switzerland. In fact, the race came with no prize
money, but that did not explain the evasiveness
of the replies Lobalu recalls getting from his
managers. They would all discuss the matter
once they returned to Kenya, he was told.
“I thought, These people, there was something
they were hiding,” he says.
Nothing is straightforward in the life of a
refugee, but for at least a moment five years
ago, it seemed as though sports might be. At
the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic
Games in Rio de Janeiro, the first IOC Refugee
Olympic Team marched behind the flag not
of a nation but of the Olympics themselves.
A joint effort of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the
International Olympic Committee (IOC), theO
team won even before its 10 members competed,
lifting the Games out of the realms of self-
dealing, cost overruns and doping scandals, and
into the realm of ideals, a place the Olympic
officials like to be.
There will be another IOC Refugee Olympic
Team at the opening ceremony in Tokyo’s
Olympic Stadium on July 23. With 29 members,
it has nearly three times as the number of
athletes who competed in Rio, representing a
population of 20.7 million, the current estimate
of people who have fled their home nation.
The most glittering sporting event on the planet
will be elevated once again by epic personal
histories involving bloodshed, poverty and
a level of endurance other Olympians could
scarcely imagine.
But things are no longer so simple. As
Lobalu’s experience shows, even refugee
Olympians grapple with the same questions—
about money, power, control and personal
agency—that dominate elite sports as much
as athletic ability does.
The training camp to which Lobalu did not
return is outside the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.