In 2008, a thin 17-year-old Somali athlete settled in to her starting block in lane two to prepare for the Olympic 200m dash.
Flanked by women in Lycra outfits, Samia Yusuf Omar stood out in her long black leggings and oversized white t-shirt. On her feet she wore shoes recently donated by the Sudanese women’s track and field team.
At the gunshot, Omar immediately fell behind. The other runners crossed the finishing line several seconds ahead of her, but seeing just how hard she was running, the crowd rose to give Omar the loudest cheer of anyone in the heat.
Charles Robinson, a journalist who watched the race, remembers: “I literally got goosebumps. They were just sort of pushing her.”
When Robinson interviewed Omar after the race the runner explained, embarrassed, that she would have preferred to be applauded for her performance instead of her effort. Seeing the quality of the other athletes in Beijing that year, she had become keenly aware of how few training resources were available to her back home.
On Friday, Somalia’s two newest Olympians will appear in the opening ceremony at the Rio games, continuing a 20-year tradition of sending competitors to The Games despite their country’s turbulent and often violent history. Omar will not be with them, but her story – one of triumph, determination and tragedy – has come to shape the country’s athletes, who have used her untimely death to fight for better protections and support.
Al-Shabaab
When Omar and her team-mates began training for the new athletics season in 2009, they were no longer just facing poor training conditions. They now had to contend with the growing influence of the militant Islamist group, al-Shabaab, which which had come to control all but two key kilometres of the capital, Mogadishu.
“Of the era of al-Shabaab, it was the worst,” said Leila Samo, a former team-mate of Omar’s, who now plays handball for Somalia. “A girl could not run, could not even walk without wearing heavy robes.”
The group not only banned all sports in the areas they controlled across southern Somalia, but pressured athletes to join their ranks.
“In that time [between 2008-2011], if you wore sports clothes al-Shabaab could have said: ‘Oh, you have leisure time. Come and fight with us’,” says Abdulahi Bare, a middle-distance runner and close friend of Omar’s.
By October 2010, after being forced to relocate to a camp for displaced persons outside the capital, Omar decided to leave Somalia. It had become too difficult for her to train and she dreamed of finding a coach in Europe. By late 2011 she was in Libya, having paid smugglers to transport her across from Ethiopia and up through Sudan.
Her sights still firmly fixed on competing at the summer Olympics, Omar boarded a flimsy, overcrowded boat in April 2012, hoping to arrive in Italy and find the training she so desired. It was a risky plan: she had no connections to professional coaches or teams in Europe and very few friends or family outside of Somalia.
Pushing off with around 70 other people, they soon ran out of petrol, leaving the boat drifting in open water. When an Italian rescue ship finally found them, many of the migrants fought to grab hold of the ropes thrown down to them. In the chaos, many people were knocked into the water – including Omar.
Witnesses said after treading water for a while, Omar eventually went under. She was never seen alive again. She was 21 years old.