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Running Back to Nature
 Ethiopia is a country of contrast, scenery of majestic splendour mingling with drought, famine and every tropical disease, modern luxury homes standing beside primitive mud huts without sanitation or water. To the unacclimatized nostril the smell of life is appalling.The country is still in the throes of civil war. In local military language much of it is not yet secure, and barely 50 km from the capital, Addis Ababa, army roadblocks signify the end of government control. Only a week ago the Provisional Military Government completed their land nationalisation programme. Those old land owners not already shot or imprisoned in the old Grand Palace have be en stripped of their assets. Many of them were the life blood of Ethiopian sport, its major sponsors, patrons and officials.
Against this background, few in the country are prepared to talk, even about sport. The newspapers are pure propaganda. Visiting those who are still unafraid is difficult. Addis has been the scene of several running gun battles during my stay. Every night heavy gun fire keeps the city awake even before the mid-night curfew. Several "imperialists", I am told, are hiding out with private armies.
In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, sport, remarkably, goes on. it has become a bargaining factor with the Big Powers, each outdoing the other in offering facilities and manpower. In 1976 the Soviet Union sent their Olympic athletic squad to compete and in March sent a coaching group. East Germany sent eight of their national coaches in mid-March and Red China is building a $3 million training area.
The United States effort here is totally overwhelmed. Former Olympic champion Mel Whitfield, who is attached to the US Information Service, has masterminded a training camp for all African nations in Addis. it will last for nearly five months until the end of June with each nation sending two potential Olympians who could not obtain high class coaching in their own events at home. Nineteen of the smaller African countries are represented but they have to foot their own bills. Ethiopia can barely afford to look after its own.
The sports association even admit that they are wary of asking for government finance. They fear it would be used as an excuse to take them over, and cost them the democratic election of officers to which they still cling tenaciously. When Yidnekachew Tessema, Ethiopian President of the African Football Confederation, appealed to all African governments during the re cent African Nations Cup not to interfere in national associations, one felt his remarks were largely directed close to home.
It is hard to arrange any appointment, and not made easy for a Westerner because 1976 in Ethiopia is 1968, in March the date had fallen nine days behind Europe and the clock begins each day at sunrise, which is always taken to be one in the morning. Hardly surprisingly, I spent a week trying to arrange a visit to Whitfield's camp, finally being promised the squad would leave the Nile Hotel at seven the next morning for their camp in the mountains. I arrived at 6.45. They had gone.
For the next two days I arrived even earlier with a hired taxi ready to follow but not until the fourth day at five did we catch sight of the party and were able to pursue. it was worth the wait. The training session, 8,250ft above sea level, in the mountains around Addis, was the strangest I had ever seen.
High jumpers trained by jumping trees and bushes, using the scissor style, and with the trees nearly seven feet high and covered in thorns, the incentive to succeed was strong, and nothing but grass to break the fall.
Hurdlers ran down the mountain hurdling bushes, scrub and small trees, leaping over irregular terrain and obstacles of uneven height not regularly spaced. Sprinters ran in bursts non-stop for two hours, and the distance men just took off to run to an even greater altitude.
Several Ethiopian athletes were there but not Miruts Yifter, fifth fastest 10,000m runner of all "time and bronze medallist at the Munich Games, and it was by chance that evening that the Ethiopian national coach Nigusse Roba was pointed out to me at a football match. I asked to meet Yifter. Yes, he said, he would bring him to me at seven the following morning. But in Ethiopia tomorrow never comes and neither did Yifter or Roba.
But a BBC reporter mentioned he was doing an interview with the pair the following morning at the Nile Hotel. An old hand by now, I arrived an hour early, and, sure enough, runner and coach had arrived. We drove some 45 km to Lake Horo, one of a ring of five lakes in the bases of extinct volcanic craters, an area of great beauty, and I was able to spend two days watching Yifter and Johannes Mohamed, a steeplechaser rat ed throughout Africa as one of the favourites for the gold medal in Montreal. Somewhere, I imagine, the BBC man is still waiting. He'll learn. In Ethiopia, the mountain must go to Mohamed.
Wherever Yifter goes he is recognized. An aircraft technician, working on vehicle maintenance at the Debre Zeyite headquarters of the Ethiopian Air Force, he is one of the few with a permit to carry a gun at all times for his own protection. He does, even in his track suit.
Married with three children, all boys, he trains three hours a day, two in the early morning and an hour each evening, just running up and down the spectacularly scenic area of Lake Horo. He lives in the area and speaks no English.
Age does not seem to matter here. Yifter was a grown man when he first competed. At the marathon trials for Montreal, most of the combatants seemed to be in their thirties. When I asked Mamo Wolde, coach to the marathon squad, how old he was, his reply, so typical to this country was: "Men can steal my cows, steal my wives, steal my chickens, so I count. They cannot steal my years. I do not count." Virtually all the potential Olympic squad are soldiers or policemen and based within a 50 km radius of Addis. Only the Services can feed and regularly provide competition but, unlike their Eastern black opposite numbers, they are soldiers first and athletes second.
Selection is totally haphazard, even for the Olympic trials. At the marathon trial, there was no advance publicity, no posters, no written invitations. It just got round by word of mouth. Officials did not know how many would compete, who they would be, or from where.
Thirty-three runners turned up, for an up hill course 6,500ft up in blistering hat and dusty conditions. Many had never before run in any competitive event, let alone a marathon, and few had proper running shoes. To own a pair of cheap school-type PT pumps was to have arrived.
The three marathon runners in Montreal will almost certainly include Gezatchew Lenhco, who is rated the best they have although he did not finish in the trials. Another will be Lenjisa Besane who won the trial in 2hr 23min 27sec, but the most intriguing selection could be Kebede Baltchia. He finished second, never having competed in any type of competitive race before turning up for the trial. With five others, these three went from the trial directly to a full-time camp where 17 Ethiopians will prepare without break until early July.
Baltchia had a sudden introduction to the facts of Ethiopian track life after the trial when he asked if he could have same running shoes.
"If you want to run you must pay to run," said Mr Ashenafi Yourial, Ethiopian Athletics Association vice president. "We are not here to provide incentives. The athletes must provide their own equipment." What about the Olympic Games, I asked. "Of course, we will then provide the air fares, accommodation and a blazer badge." Even Yifter had had to buy his own national tracksuit, and had not had a new one since 1969. Mohamed still did not own one.
Money is so tight that athletes will even have to double up as officials in Montreal. "How many officials go will depend on how many athletes are educated," said Mr Tadelle Mellesse, the EEA secretary. Why send an official if an athlete can do the job. We cannot afford both, and anyway permission to travel is now difficult in this country." One of the problems of sending any competitor abroad, he said, was they saw how the other half live. "We raised the money to send Yifter to compete against Haro in Spain. He saw how Haro had a sumptuous home, a large car and money, and he came home dissatisfied." But one could understand the dissatisfaction. I spent two days with.
Yifter and whenever I asked to photograph his home, he said "Yes, but not today." Even when Roba and I drove to pick him up from home, Roba would stop same way away and ask me to get out and wait while he drove the last few hundred yards. Finally Yifter brought his family to me, and Roba confided that they did not live like Europeans and were embarrassed. I could only assume his house was no different to the mud huts a few hundred yards away.
Sport in Ethiopia is totally male dominated. There were same female athletes but, with a hopeless gesture, Mr Youria said that since 95 per cent of Ethiopian girls became pregnant while still at school, they did not bother to encourage them at sport.
But dearly sport is a powerful factor in the country. One of the most general complaints is that Britain has not answered letters requesting details of our Five Star A ward athletics scheme which Ethiopia would like to introduce. Children generally do not go to school until secondary age, and officials admit they then have to work hard to catch up which is why few take up athletics until their early twenties. But with organization, the potential is unlimited, even if it must be limited for another generation to a single province.
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