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In the lead-up to World Refugee Day on 20 June, members of the Refugee Olympic Team will be sharing their…

In the lead-up to World Refugee Day on 20 June, members of the Refugee Olympic Team will be sharing their…

In the lead-up to World Refugee Day on 20 June, members of the Refugee Olympic Team will be sharing their stories in a series of features as they prepare for the Games in Tokyo. The series continues with sprinter Dorian Keletela.

With the exception of the football World Cup, there’s simply no stage in sport that can rival the Olympic Games – its global reach, its captive audience, the knowledge participants have that on that platform, for those few weeks, the whole world is watching.

As such, it’s an ideal place to not only entertain, but also inspire – a medium through which to send a message. For Dorian Keletela, a 22-year-old member of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, his performance in the men’s 100m in Tokyo will be about far more than his time or finishing position.

“The world needs inspiration, a good message,” he says. “The message I want to send is that refugee people are a strong people and they can do everything a normal person can do.”

A native of Congo, Keletela faced tragedy early in life. In his teens he lost both of his parents, who were victims of political persecution, and he moved in with his aunt, who cared for him thereafter.

“In Congo the important thing is to respect your Mum, and I respected her like a Mum,” he says.

In 2016 the two fled to Portugal where he spent more than a year in refugee centres, a difficult situation but one he had to endure to escape the risk at home.

“It was very complicated to live there,” he says of his native country. “But (leaving) was not really a choice.”

Keletela first took up athletics at the age of 15 while still living in Congo and, the following year, he ran 10.68 for 100m. After settling in Portugal and joining a local club, he lowered his best to 10.48 in 2017.

He arrived unable to speak Portuguese but these days he’s fluent and for all the difficulties he endured, he has since built a much better life, with plans to become a coach in the future.

“In Portugal I have more liberty,” he says. “This is very fundamental because people look for liberty in life. Congo doesn’t have liberty.”

In March this year, Keletela became the first member of the World Athletics Athlete Refugee Team to compete at the European Indoor Championships, powering down the track in the light blue singlet and finishing eighth in his 60m heat in 6.91.

Dorian Keletela in action at the European Indoor Championships

“This experience was very good for me because it was a championship of Europe,” he says. “I was thankful to all those who helped make it happen.”

A member of Sporting Lisbon, Keletela has worn their green and white stripes with pride at many domestic events over the past couple of years. Keletela joined the Athlete Refugee Team programme in 2019 but injury sidelined him from the World Championships that year. Despite the disruption to training caused by the pandemic last year, he lowered his 100m best to 10.46 (0.7m/s) in Lisbon and clocked 10.48 in the heats of the national championships.

His 2021 season is already shaping up well, with a 10.55 100m clocking in May and a wind-aided 10.51 (+2.2m/s) in June. He typically trains six days a week for up to three or four hours a day, and last week his hard work was rewarded when he was among 29 athletes from 11 countries named on the IOC Refugee Olympic Team. They will compete across 12 sports at the Tokyo Games.

“My objective is to make a mark,” he says. “I hope to do a personal best.”

But his goal also runs deeper than that.

Keletela knows that as countries become more multi-cultural, there can often be a growing swell of anti-immigration sentiment, but he wants people to know what life is really like for refugees, how the similarities to them far outweigh the differences.

“People sometimes have the impression refugees are bad but they are normal people,” he says. “Refugees are very motivated to invest in their life, to recreate their life. They are normal people that just had to move from their country that’s in conflict to go to another.”

Over time, he has seen the positives of being a refugee.

“For me, to be a refugee is an opportunity to be here to run,” he says. “If I wasn’t a refugee, I wouldn’t be able to run at the Olympics. I can be an inspiration for other refugees and people who have a similar experience to me because life is not always easy for everyone.”

Making the Games is something Keletela “never dreamed of” before arriving in Portugal, but ever since hearing about the refugee team a vision formed: him settling into the blocks alongside the fastest men in the world on the grandest stage in sport.

“When I saw this group I said, ‘maybe one day I will be part of this’,” he says. “And now this dream is my reality.”

Cathal Dennehy for World Athletics

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In the lead-up to World Refugee Day on 20 June, members of the Refugee Olympic Team will be sharing their stories in a series of features as they prepare for the Games in Tokyo. The series begins with 1500m runner Anjelina Nadai Lohalith.

Last Tuesday’s confirmation that Anjelina Nadai Lohalith had been picked for the Refugee Olympic Team for a second successive Games was cause for celebration – and the 28-year-old 1500m runner duly marked the occasion at her Ngong training camp in Kenya, with much “music and dancing”.

But any day now an even more significant moment awaits as she prepares to reunite with the family she left behind when, aged nine, she escaped from her war-ravaged village in South Sudan and made her way to the vast Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya – where her father and mother have recently arrived themselves.

It will be the first time she has seen her parents since the day she and her aunt boarded a United Nations truck that had been bringing food into an area traumatically affected by a civil war that eventually ended in 2005, three years after she had reached her new home.

Recalling in a Zoom call from her training centre how the war had come to her village, Lohalith said: “Soldiers came in the night. I didn’t understand what was happening, I just heard the shooting.

“We ran to the next village and we slept in the bush at nights. We wanted to go back to our village to get food and all the things we had left behind. It was really an emergency, and we had almost nothing with us.

“But we were told we could not go back because the soldiers were occupying our village and around the village there were what they called ‘weapons underground’, which were landmines. It was not safe.

“The UN bus came with food, and that was how I was able to get out with my aunt. I thought my family would be coming after me. But they didn’t come.”

Lohalith’s “dearest wish”

Lohalith has maintained since making the Refugee Olympic Team for the Rio 2016 Games as one of five track athletes that her “dream” was to one day help her parents.

Asked how she felt about the prospect of meeting them after so long, she paused for a few moments before saying: “It is my dearest wish.”

She added: “It makes me so happy that my parents are now in the camp. Soon we will have a welcome party!”

Already, however, her mother and father have met their grandson for the first time – Lohalith’s four-year-old son Jayden Luis Monutore.

Her parents were preceded to Kakuma by other relatives, including another of her aunts and a cousin, and they have helped to look after Jayden – already a natural runner according to his proud mum – while she has been training to make the Rio 2016 team.

“My parents don’t know about my running,” she said. “They only know about my schooling. I think it will be hard for them to understand about the Olympics. They don’t know anything about it.”

Anjelina Nadai Lohalith trains at the Refugee Athletes Centre in Ngong (© AFP / Getty Images)

Lohalith has spoken in the past of how Tegla Loroupe, Kenya’s former world marathon record-holder and three-time world half marathon winner, came to the Kakuma Camp as part of the work of her Peace Foundation and organised trial races in 2015 to identify those who might be able to run at the Olympics.

At that time Lohalith knew nothing of international athletics but she had been, like her son, a natural runner for as long as she could remember.

“Wherever I went I would run,” she recalled. “When I went to fetch something for my mother I always ran, because I didn’t want to be beaten by her!

“I just loved running for no reason, but I did not know anything about racing until Tegla came to the camp. I didn’t know who she was – I only found out about her medals and her world record later.”

In Rio, Lohalith ran 4:47.38 in her opening 1500m heat. Two years later she reduced that time to 4:33.54 at the World Athletics Championships in London.

She wanted to continue her international career by appearing at the Doha 2019 World Championships. “I wanted to go to Doha but it was soon after maternity leave and I just didn’t make it,” she said. “It was not my time to go. But now I AM going back to the Olympics!

“I was not sure I would be in the team. I was nervous. I am so happy to be going to Tokyo.”

Another chance

Part of the reason for her uncertainty was the difficulties the pandemic had thrown up to her training regime, which faltered as the Olympics were postponed by a year.

“We were training very hard for the Olympics. In 2020 we were in very good shape, very confident. I felt I was in shape to reach the semifinals,” she said.

“Then it was very difficult, we had to go back to the camp and try to train there, but you could not train in big groups. And it was very hot – we used to train at five in the morning, but we missed the facilities of the training camp.

“Tegla was very encouraging, she gave us schedules while we were back in the camp. She said: ‘It will be difficult, but you have to try and stay with it. It will be hard, but you can do it.’”

In Lohalith’s case, Loroupe was right.

“I can say I feels so great,” the soon-to-be double Olympian said. “I am really honoured but it was not something I ever expected. I feel so happy to be given another chance, and I just want to improve on my best time.

“People all over the world wish to get this chance, but that is something that not all of us can do. It’s very hard. That is why they were using some kind of criteria to select athletes.

“Before Rio in the camp we were told that maybe one person can be lucky to go. But from my team all six of us were lucky to be selected. Now the number is halved. There is a higher competition now and that is why they did so many trials.”

Anjelina Nadai Lohalith in action at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games (© AFP / Getty Images)

Since arriving in Kenya, Lohalith has learned fluent English. Asked how she had managed to attain this language, she responded: “I just read. I like reading novels – love novels, inspiring books. One of my favourite authors is Nelson Mandela.”

Speaking recently, Rwanda’s International Olympic Committee member Felicite Rwemarika described how she had been forced to flee her home when members of the Tutsi tribe were being massacred in 1959, and added that, during her subsequent travel in Uganda and Burundi, her family had been treated with suspicion and denied access to vital services, having to change their name at one point.

How had Lohalith’s experience of being a refugee in a foreign land compared?

“I have not been through that kind of an issue,” she said. “Not that much. We are in camp most of the time. We and Kenyans, most of the time we are the same with our facial appearance.

“It only happens sometimes if you meet with some few people, but only with a few.

“You cannot expect them to be 100 per cent about refugees in another country. Not everybody can see what you are going through. They can’t understand it. Some will be negative. When you introduce yourself as a refugee, they get a look on their face. We just have to understand, we don’t have any choice.

“We hope others see we are just normal people like them.”

The power of sport

As well as visiting Rio and London to compete, Lohalith has also been to Uganda and to Canada, where she attended the One Young World Summit in Ottawa, a global forum for youth leaders to discuss global issues.

“I enjoy travelling a lot,” she said. “It is part of my passion – travelling to see the world. When I was young, I always told myself that one day you will be travelling the world in an airplane. But I never had an idea on what I was going to do or how it could happen.

“But now my dream has happened. It is sport that has helped me to travel.

“Through running I was able to know more people, people who have been able to compete in international races. I feel so great when I make so many friends from other countries.

“When I compete, I can meet people and make friends and we stay in contact. I am always happy and honoured for it, to be building that kind of a relationship with people.

“People do not just go to compete, they make friends in different countries. It is something very great for me. That is a big reason why sport is so important – it can also bring people together.”

For now, however, Lohalith is turning her eyes once more to the Olympic arena.

Asked when she would leave for Japan, she laughed suddenly and exclaimed: “I don’t care when I go! I am going!”

Mike Rowbottom for World Athletics

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