My favourite Olympian ever is Emil Zatopek the great distance runner who won 1 gold in 1948 and swept the long distance races in the 1952 games. My second favourite is the great Ethiopian 2 time Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila.

Abebe Bikila was born in 1932 the son of a shepherd.This man must have been born to be a marathon runner. The day he was born what was going on? It was the day of the marathon race at the 1932 Los Angeles Games!  You  As a young man he joined the Imperial Bodyguard. He became involved in athletics but he was an unknown going into the 1960 Rome Games.

If there was ever an athlete who came out of nowhere to win a gold medal it was Abebe Bikila.  It was a fluke event that he even went to the games. He was a last minute addition to the Ethiopian team for Wami Biratu who broke an ankle in a soccer match right before the games.

At the games Adidas was the official shoe sponsor, Bikila was late in getting there to get his shoes and the ones that were left didn’t fit him right. Several hours before the Marathon he decided instead of wearing shoes that were uncomfortable he would just do what he did while training, run barefoot.

The race would start in the late afternoon at the Arch of Constantine. It would later end there.  Bikila’s coach told him the runner to beat, the man to watch was Rhadi Ben Abdesselam from Morocco. He would be #26. There was some mess up and Abdesselam was #185. Bikila didn’t know that the runner who was running along side him was Abdesselam. These two runners stayed together until about 500 meters to go when Abebe Bikila sprinted ahead, Abdesselam could not keep up. Abebe Bikila won the race by .25 seconds. He became the first sub-saharan athlete to ever win a gold medal.

At the 1964 Tokyo Games Abebe Bikila traveled to the games but it wasn’t believed he would be able to compete. 40 days eariler while training he felt a pain. He didn’t know the cause so he kept running, until he collapsed.  He would be operated on for acute appendicitis . He was done.  But no, as soon as he got out of the hospital he started running again. At Tokyo he entered the Marathon after all. His strategy was to stay with the lead pack until the 20k mark then increase his pace. No one could stay with him. He won the gold medal, setting a new world record while doing it, finishing 4 minutes and 8 seconds ahead of the silver medalist. After crossing the finish line Bikila started doing stretching exercises, saying he could have run another 10 kilometers. Abebe Bikila was the first to repeat as Olympic Champion in the Marathon.

He was there in Mexico City in 1968 for the marathon. At the 17 kilometer mark Bikila had to withdraw from the race due to an ankle injury. A few days before the race while training he had broken a bone in his foot. The winner of the 1968 marathon was his friend and training partner Mamo Wolde. Wolde would say that if Abebe hadn’t been hurt that he would surely have won.

Sadly, in 1969 Abebe Bikila was involved in a car accident that left him a quadriplegic, He was operated on in England and was improed to a paraplegic. He was in Munich as a special guest for the games and watched Frank Shorter of the US win the Marathon. After winning Shorter went and shook the hand of Abebe Bikila.

On October 25th Abebe Bikila, the great Marathon champion died at the age of 41 of a cerebral hemorrhage. 75,000 attended his funeral.