The Marathon Won Barefoot

The 1960 Rome Olympics marathon started at night, on cobblestones, in heat that had not broken. Among the runners was a 28-year-old Ethiopian soldier and bodyguard named Abebe Bikila, competing in only his third marathon.

His shoes were the problem. The pair supplied by the team's sponsor didn't fit properly and had already given him blisters in training. So a few days before the race, he decided to run it barefoot.

He had run barefoot most of his life. It was not a stunt.

The race went out along the Appian Way, past the Catacombs, on stone slabs laid down by the Romans two thousand years earlier. Bikila ran at the back of the lead group for much of it, then, in the final kilometres, moved away from the field. He finished alone.

His time was 2:15:16.2 — a world record, and the first Olympic marathon under 2 hours 20 minutes run outside the previous era's best marks. He was the first Black African athlete to win Olympic gold.

And the finish line matters here. The marathon ended at the Arch of Constantine — the route passing directly beneath monuments built to celebrate Mussolini's fascist regime, and past the site of Italy's 1936 Olympic propaganda. An athlete from a country Italy had invaded five years earlier ran under those arches, barefoot, alone, and won.

He did it again in Tokyo in 1964, in 2:12:11.2, another world record — this time wearing shoes, and only 40 days after surgery for appendicitis. He remains the only man to win consecutive Olympic marathon titles.

He later said something that doesn't sound like an athlete's line: that the race was not the hard part. The hard part was preparing to be able to run it. He had, by then, been running for years in thin air at altitude in Ethiopia, in a way no European coach of the time had thought to copy.