REFUGEE ATHLETES
RUN LAPS AT THE
TRAINING CAMP IN
NGONG, KENYA
Known as the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation
Training Center, the camp was founded by
Loroupe, a legendary Kenyan runner—and
a two-time winner of the New York City
Marathon. Her organization was the inspiration
for, and the core of, the first Refugee Olympic
Team, half of whose members lived and trained
at the Kenya site.
The camp will send four runners to Tokyo,
all of them, like Lobalu, exiled from war-ravaged
South Sudan. But absent from the Tokyo
Olympics refugee team are six of its strongest
runners, who spent years training for the Games
at the camp in Kenya—and who then absconded
from the program, effectively fleeing the team
with little warning and against all the rules, from
2017 to 2019. In interviews with TIME, two of
those six men say their decisions were driven
in part by rising tensions over their training
and dissatisfaction with a system that, to them,
appeared to deny them opportunities to create
lives outside the program.
Lobalu, who had dreamed of being the first
Olympic refugee medalist, became on that
spring day in 2019 the most recent of the six
defectors. Within hours of winning the race in
Geneva, he made a decision that would change
his life and doom his prospects of running in
Tokyo this month.
The conversations after the Geneva race had
been the final straw, Lobalu says. Implicit in the
manner of his managers was the belief that as
refugees the athletes should accept whatever
they had, whether there was prize money or
not—an attitude he steadily began to reject.
“We cannot talk about money. We were
supposed to go, and come back to the camp,”
Lobalu, now 22, tells TIME. “They took us to
Geneva, so we cannot complain... We are not
supposed to talk, because we are just a refugee.”
Before dawn the next morning, he slipped
out of the team’s Geneva hotel with a fellow
South Sudanese refugee, Gatkuoth Puok Thiep.
They left no note. The two friends wandered for
hours, with no money or contacts, and only one
plan: they would not return to Kenya with their
teammates; somehow they would find a way to
stay in Switzerland.
The break was clean, but the feelings remain
complex. The decision to quit the program left
each athlete TIME spoke to highly conflicted.
The two former athletes from the Loroupe
program said they felt they were being denied
opportunities and prize money, and they
spoke of an atmosphere in the training camp
of overbearing control. At the same time, even
athletes who left the team spoke of how the
training in Kenya had transformed their lives,
giving them passion and purpose they otherwise
might never have found.
They singled out for special gratitude
Loroupe, who remains in charge of the camp
and who fielded TIME’s questions about the
controversies. Loroupe created her organization
in 2003 to organize “Peace Runs” comprising
warring tribes, and she is now the IOC’s “chief
of mission” for the refugee team at the Tokyo
Olympics. “She is not just the coach; she is the
mother of everyone,” says Gai John Nyang, who
fled the team in 2017 amid an angry dispute and
who now lives in Mainz, Germany. “Everyone
respects her, even me, right up to today.”
This month, the emotions of the athletes are
particularly raw as they watch their four close
friends from the training camp head to the
Tokyo Olympics. Those who left the camp also
forfeited their chance to compete. The IOC and
UNHCR ruled that Lobalu, Nyang and the other
four runners who defected could not even try
out for the Olympics team.
The athletes call that arbitrary punishment
for having dared to walk away from the team.
But the U.N. and the IOC say the men are no89