Lopez Lomong visited his own gravesite last year.

Lost and found

By Josh Peter, Yahoo! Sports Aug 8, 6:56 am EDT


BEIJING – Lopez Lomong visited his own gravesite last year.

Having lost hope after their son was abducted as a 6-year-old boy, Lomong’s parents buried his belongings near their home in Sudan. The reunited family returned to the site in December, dug up the possessions and, before Lomong returned to the country he now calls home, he bought them a TV on which they’ll watch the next step of his remarkable journey.

Lomong, a 23-year-old distance runner who became a United States citizen last year, carried the American flag as the U.S. Olympic team marched into National Stadium for the Opening Ceremony Friday night.

Lomong is one of the so-called “Lost Boys” of Sudan, children taken against their will by soldiers in a remote region of Africa where hundreds of thousands have been massacred during an ongoing civil war.

Today he is one of over 70 Olympic athletes who comprise Team Darfur, a group formed to increase awareness of the violence raging through Africa. Members have called on the Chinese government to use its leverage as a trading partner with Sudan to curb the atrocities there, something that has become a hot-button issue at the Beijing Games.

Earlier this week, the Chinese unintentionally increased Team Darfur’s visibility when the government revoked the visa of U.S. speedskater and activist Joey Cheek, the group’s co-founder. As the U.S. Olympic Committee said there was nothing they could do for Cheek and the White House tried to intervene on his behalf, something was happening among U.S. athletes. The captains of each team met in the Olympic Village. It was time to select the flag bearer.

They chose Lomong.

“How awesome is that?” Cheek said.

“The American flag means everything in my life, everything that describes me, coming from another country and getting through all the stages that I have to become a U.S. citizen,” Lomong said. “This is another amazing step for me in celebrating being an American.”

At a news conference early Friday, Lomong gracefully sidestepped questions about China’s role in Darfur and shifted inquiries about its human rights record to his own story, a harrowing tale in which he escaped from armed captors where he subsisted on one meal a day. He was a 15-year-old boy then, running and playing soccer to take his mind off of hunger, when officials informed him that the United States wanted to place 3,500 of the Lost Boys in foster homes.

First, he had to write an essay about his life that would be sent to prospective families. And so in a refugee camp, struggling to find the English words to translate the essay from his native Swahili, he told his tale that started with a happy-go-lucky 6-year-old living in Sudan.

It was easy to be a carefree boy then because Lomong’s parents told him nothing about the civil war, or the soldiers that slaughtered dark-skinned Sudanese like his own family.

“I was the happiest kid in the world,” Lomong said.

One Sunday, the family attended church. Soldiers stormed in and ordered everyone to lie on the ground. The children were blindfolded and loaded onto a canvas-covered truck.

A short while later, the truck stopped. The boys were separated from the girls. The blindfolds stayed on.

Not until Lomong and the other boys arrived at a makeshift prison did the soldiers remove the blindfolds. The soldiers marched the boys single file and fed them a virtually indigestible mix of grain and sand.

Some of the boys ate too much too fast. Those boys fell asleep, and never awoke.

“Well, it’s his day today,” Lomong recalled thinking as he watched yet another young boy die. “But it’s probably my day tomorrow.”

In the dead of night, a few weeks after arriving at the labor camp, Lomong and a few friends crawled out of the barracks and squeezed through a hole in a fence and fled their captors under a moonless sky.

“That’s when my race started,” he said.

They ran for three days and three nights, only to end up in the clutches of new captors. Like other Lost Boys trying to escape, they had unwittingly crossed into Kenya, where government officials put them in refugee camps.

He figured his parents were dead. Unbeknownst to Lomong, they thought the same about him. Yet the 23-year-old man whose gap-toothed smile belies the horrors he has experienced said of that time, “I became happy again.”

Besides playing soccer and running to help forget about his hunger, Lomong also worked inside the camp. He swept, fetched water and milked a cow for five schillings. To this day, he thinks an act of God led him to save those schillings, a down payment on his Olympic dream.

It was 2000, and some boys in the Kenyan refugee camp started talking about the upcoming Olympics. Olympics? Lomong had never even heard of them. But the more the boys talked about them, the more he was intrigued.

He joined the boys on a five-mile walk to the house of a stranger, who charged them five schillings apiece to come inside and watch the Olympics on a black-and-white TV.

Lomong stared at the screen and found himself transfixed by Michael Johnson, the American record holder in the 200 and 400 meters.

“I want to be as fast as that guy and I want to wear that uniform,” he said. “I want to run for that country.”

Of course, he first had to get to that country.

The opportunity presented itself when he was 15 and the United States wanted to place 3,500 of the Lost Boys in foster homes.

A couple from Tully, N.Y., read Lomong’s essay and were so moved they asked to adopt him. When Robert and Barbara Rogers picked Lomong at the airport, they took him to McDonald’s for his first American meal. He was startled to find himself eating a chicken sandwich – chicken having been a delicacy in the refugee camp, where they boys got a few scraps on Easter and Christmas.

Upon enrolling at the local high school, he found himself just as astonished at the windfall.

“I had books. I had pens, pencils. Everything,” he said. “Everything I had was like a blessing.”

The Sudanese survivor began to thrive.

The race he said began the night he escaped from the labor camp in Sudan and continued in the safe confines of a high school track in upstate New York. Once running out of fear, he now ran with joy – and like the wind. He earned a scholarship to Northern Arizona University, where he developed into one of the country’s top middle-distance runners.

After reconnecting with his family in Sudan – the family he thought was dead – he visited in August 2007 and again in December, when they visited his grave and he bought them a TV so they could watch the games like he once did on that old black and white.

“I told them, ‘Yep, you will be watching me in the Olympics,’ ” he said.

Having gained American citizenship in 2007, he was eligible to compete for the U.S. There was one little hitch: He had yet to make the team.

He barely did, finishing third at the trials in Eugene, Ore., and grabbing the final spot in the 1,500. Whether or not he medals in Beijing, his legacy has been cemented.

“His story is absolutely the very essence of what we talk about when we say the great force the Olympics can be. This kid was kidnapped, escaped, lived in refugee camps, was able to come to the United States, was able to find his family and made the Olympic team for the U.S.

“He is a great success story. He represents all of the great ideals of the Olympics.”

On Friday, roughly 10 hours before he would lead the Americans into National Stadium, Lomong said he could not find the words to properly express his excitement and gratitude. But he revealed the spirit that has driven him while recounting what entered his mind when he first saw Michael Johnson streaking to gold years ago.

“I know that I’m going to make it to the Olympics one day,” he recalled thinking. “I didn’t know what country, but here we are.”