Off track

ONE 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), the team won even before its 10 members competed, lifting the Games out of the realms of self-dealing, cost overruns and doping scandals,