TOKYO
OLYMPICS
CAMP FOUNDER TEGLA
LOROUPE, LEFT, AND
DOMINIC LOKINYOMO
LOBALU, WHO NOW
LIVES AND COMPETES
IN SWITZERLAND
92 TIME July 19/July 26, 2021
themselves,” said one source who had tracked the
athletes for fi ve years, spent time at Loroupe’s
training camp and kept in close touch with them.
“It [the training program in Kenya] was more for
the UNHCR than for the athletes.”
Asked about these accusations, Stephen
Pattison, the UNHCR’s deputy chief of mission,
said the defections from the Kenya training camp
prompted the commission and the IOC to try to
secure scholarships for runners picked for the
Tokyo Olympics team—all of whom competed
in the Rio Olympics fi ve years ago. Speaking
to TIME by telephone in a conversation that
the IOC insisted it monitor, Pattison said
the thinking was that athletes badly needed
the prospect of real opportunities after the
Olympics—something the IOC and UNHCR had
failed to off er after Rio and, according to the two
defector athletes Lobalu and Nyang, a reason the
Kenya program lost six talented runners. “We
understood that there was a concern about what
happens next,” Pattison said.
Loroupe told TIME in an interview from
Kenya (also with an IOC representative in
attendance) that she bore no responsibility for
the six men who have fl ed her camp. “I would
not be happy to take such a blame there,” she
said, when asked whether she might have
discouraged athletes from leaving. For those
who want to leave, she said, “they have to go
the right way.”
FOR DOMINIC LOKINYOMO LOBALU—the star
runner—there was no “right way” to leave, as
Loroupe says. Within hours of winning the race
in Geneva, he had broken ranks from the refu-
gee team and fl ed his hotel. Like Nyang’s, Loba-
lu’s family had scattered while fl eeing their war-
torn village in South Sudan, a country that came
into being in 2011 after a decades-long civil war
with Sudan, and where fi ghting has remained
common in independence. He spent some of
his childhood in an orphanage, playing soccer
as a way to dull the intense pain of loss, eventu-
ally taking up running at a school near Nairobi,
where he was discovered by Loroupe.
Three months after Lobalu went AWOL from
Loroupe’s team, a Swiss refugee center contacted
Markus Hagmann, an athletics coach in Saint-
Gallen, Switzerland, saying there were two South
Sudanese men who wanted to run. Hagmann
invited them to his club and instantly spotted
major star potential in Lobalu. He brought him
to the fi rst race he could fi nd in Switzerland.
Lobalu won the race—and has continued
winning in Switzerland. In addition to On, he
also now has endorsement funding from the
Italian insurance giant Generali. In late June, he
ran a 5,000-m Swiss race in 14 min. 1 sec., one-
thousandth of a second behind the winner—
who is competing for Switzerland at the Tokyo
Olympics. Unable to compete at Tokyo (he
too has no offi cial refugee status), Lobalu will
instead spend July and August training at an
athletic center high in the Swiss Alps.
Meanwhile, On’s marketing chief, Robayna,
says the company has hired a lawyer to secure
residence status in Switzerland for Lobalu,
whose renown has grown among the country’s
runners. Hagmann estimates that it could take
up to 10 years for Lobalu to become a citizen,
making it uncertain whether Lobalu will be
able to compete as a Swiss national in the 2024
Olympics in Paris.
As for the question of money, after winning
his fi rst Swiss race back in 2019, Lobalu climbed
into Hagmann’s car. There, Hagmann showed
Lobalu the 200 Swiss francs (about $218) he had
won, then deadpanned, “Oh, this is mine now,”
Hagmann recalls. “He went white, and I said, It’s
a joke. It was the fi rst time he realized, ‘No one
is going to take my money away from me.’”
—With reporting by NIK POPLI and SIMMONE
SHAH/WASHINGTON □