TOKYO
OLYMPICS
longer offi cially refugees, a protected status
intended for those caught between countries,
and forfeited upon settlement in one. Loroupe
adds that allowing them to compete in Tokyo
would encourage those still in her training camp
to try to leave too. Indeed, Loroupe met with
Lobalu in Switzerland seven months after he
quit the team and tried to coax him to return to
Kenya so he could run in the Tokyo Olympics,
according to Lobalu. “She said, ‘You will get
all the chance you are looking for,’ ” he says. He
turned her down, and now will watch his friends
in Tokyo from 7,000 miles away.
THE VERY FACT that 29 refugees representing
13 nationalities are competing in Tokyo upends
a fundamental feature of the Olympics, which
for more than a century has been organized
around national patriotism. “Most of the
refugees lacked the right to compete,” Olivier
Niamkey, the IOC’s deputy chief of mission for
the refugee program, tells TIME, describing the
organization’s negotiations with various athletics
federations, which fi nally cracked open the door
to refugees in 2015 after long discussions. “It is
not just about money,” he says. “They have no
fl ag to compete under.”
Indeed, to assemble the refugee team, the
IOC asked nations to do the sorting. The original
group of 43 candidates for the 2016 Games was
identifi ed. In Kenya, Loroupe knew where to
look for runners. She traveled to the country’s
northern border and the Kakuma refugee camp,
a sprawling, sun-baked settlement operated
by the UNHCR and home to at least 170,000
refugees from nearby countries. To identify
potential talent, Loroupe staged a 10-km race.
From those who showed up—some barefoot,
some with barely any footwear, none having run
an organized race—she picked the fastest and
fl ew them 450 miles south to her training camp
in the lush Ngong hills just outside Nairobi. “I
didn’t even know what is the Olympics,” says
Rose Nathike Lokonyen, 28, who is on the IOC
Refugee Olympic Team again in Tokyo for the
second time, after the Rio Games. In Ngong,
93 miles south of the equator and 1.2 miles above
sea level, they began rigorous, high- altitude
training for the Rio Olympics. Raised in the
Kakuma refugee camp, Lokonyen ran barefoot
in Loroupe’s 10-km race in 2015 and fi nished
second. “We didn’t know about time,” she tells
me, recalling that race. “We just ran.”
The point of the Refugee Olympic Team, in
fact, is not to clock the fastest time. That would be
a daunting task, given that elite runners train for
years on state-of-the-art tracks before reaching
the Olympics. The point, rather, is to be there. “We
want to send a message of hope for all refugees
in our world,” IOC president Thomas Bach said
before the Rio Games. For the refugees who, like
the South Sudanese runners, have witnessed
intense brutality, the program has also helped heal
painful traumas. Running, says Nyang, “is like
medicine to me. When I run, I calm down.”
From being touted as a one-off event for
the 2016 Games amid a swelling of refugees
emerging from the Middle East and nations
including Eritrea and Somalia, the program now
appears increasingly permanent. For this year’s
pandemic-postponed Olympic Games, the IOC
expanded the program to include other parts of
the world, and more sports. Niamkey says the
IOC’s Olympic Solidarity fund set aside $3 million
between 2016 and 2021 for scholarships for 56
refugee athletes worldwide, out of a total budget
of about $100 million to fund thousands of
athletes. Disbursements, he says, are in the form
of monthly $1,500 payments.
There is an exception to that: the athletes
at the Tegla Loroupe camp in Kenya. Niamkey
estimated the payments to the refugees there
were “between $100 and $200” a month. But
both Nyang and Lobalu independently said
they received a monthly stipend of 5,000LEON NEAL—AFP/GETTY IMAGES
BY THE NUMBERS
Number of refugee athletes
competing in Tokyo,
representing 13 nationalitiesNumber of countries where the
Olympic Refuge Foundation has
supported sports programsNumber who left the
Tegla Loroupe training camp
from 2017 to 2019The budget set aside
for scholarships for the
refugee-athlete programNumber of sports in which
refugee athletes will compete
at the Tokyo Games29
12
8
6
RUNNERS
$3M
SOURCE: IOC
90 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021