In May 2019, a 20-year-old named Dominic Lokinyomo Lobalu, originally from what is now South Sudan, wins a 10-kilometer road race organized by Unicef in Geneva, Switzerland. Three months later, Markus Hagmann, a teacher from St. Gallen, former national champion in the 3,000 steeplechase, coach at a local athletics club, receives a phone call from a Swiss refugee center: “Here is someone who wants to run, that’s all he can say. Interest?”. Lobalu, who competed for the Athlete Refugee Team, fled the hotel and requested asylum. He escaped twice: from those who persecuted him and from those who had to save him.
At nine years old he lost his parents in the brutal civil war that preceded independence from Sudan and fled across the nearby border into Kenya. He competes for them at the 2017 London World Championships: two years later, dissatisfied with how they treat him, he also runs away from them.
Then coach Hagmann agrees to meet him: “It made a very bad impression on me, I had a person in front of me who was emotionally and physically scared. Empty, tired, half dead. But she started running and became someone else. Elegant, soft, light. He resurrected, full of life and grace.”
Six months later, Dominic wins his first local race. He was surprised: the prize of 218 dollars all went to him, he wasn’t used to it. He obtains a short-term residence permit. In June 2022, in a stage of the Diamond League, an athlete wearing the white jersey won the 3,000 meters in Stockholm, beating the favorite Kiplimo. He is the unknown Lobalu, the man without a country. They find a company that sponsors it. Hagmann takes care of it professionally: physiotherapist, exams, clinical tests, malnutrition has left traces.
In 2023 in Cannes, on the occasion of World Refugee Day, it was presented the documentary The Right to RaceThe Right to Run, directed by director Richard Bullock. It is the complicated story of Lobalu. Now he no longer belongs to South Sudan (“I cannot represent a country that took everything from me and killed my parents”), nor to the Refugee Team (for World Athletics, the international athletics government, he is a double defector) , he is from Switzerland whose shirt he can wear, thanks to his residence permit, but no passport. Not being an EU citizen, he will have to wait 10 years to move up the ladder and request domicile. There are no exceptions, except for marriage. And he cannot enjoy refugee status because he comes from Kenya where he was not at risk of individual persecution.
Some kind of international intrigue.
The 2024 of the man who ran away twice, however, is sensational: in Oslo on May 20th in the Diamond League he improves by 16 seconds the Swiss national record in the 5,000 meters, set by Markus Ryffel, Olympic silver medalist in Los Angeles ’84. Not only, at the European Championships in Rome last week he won two medals for Switzerland, a bronze in the five thousand meters and gold in the ten thousand metres.
He is the first (ex) refugee to do so. The example that those fleeing wars and famines does not just deserve applause for having been able to resist, but concrete help and respect. The International Olympic Committee confirms that Lobalu is not entitled to represent Switzerland at the Paris Olympics because he does not have a passport. In all likelihood he will compete for the “Refugee Olympic Athletes”, a “nation” which, according to the United Nations, has 120 million individuals in the world.
Because there are runners without a country who have the entire world as their border.
Tiziano Conti
Wikipedia photo by Erik van Leeuwen – Zenfolio Erki
