Hero For A Thirsty Land

Abdi Bile was resplendent in the azure and white silks of Somalia. There were 800 meters to go in the 1,500 at the World Championships last September in Rome, and Bile was patiently running 11th, wearing the colors of his nation's flag—water and sand, sky and milk, the blue of everything that is empty and the white of old grievances.

Of the last, one was personal. Bile twice had won the NCAA 1,500 for George Mason University of Fairfax. Va., but he had been frustrated all season by being unable to force a race against the man running in second. Steve Cram of Great Britain, the world-record holder in the mile and the world champion at 1,500 meters.

During the summer, in Oslo in July, the promoters had blatantly switched Bile out of the mile race into the 1,500 meters. Cram won the mile. Bile came in second in his race. And again, in August in Zurich, the two could have met, but there Bile ran and won the mile, while Cram won in the 1,500. By offering a little protection from major competitors, a meet often lands the stars. Bile was good but not a star, a threat but not a draw. So he was expendable.

Bile would seem to be an apt name for a bitter man, but it is pronounced BEE-leh, and the runner wasn't consumed by resentment. He would get his chance at the worlds. "If things go well always, you get lazy," he would say later in reflection. "I was angry, but it didn't hurt me at all. I just tried to improve to where that wasn't going to happen again."

It won't. When Cram began his move for the lead with 500 meters to go in Rome, Bile went with him, his emotions surging. "Sometimes it's difficult to know the difference between being afraid and being anxious." he said. "But I felt something great happening."

By the last turn, Cram was dead. Bile shot past and drew smoothly away. "The main thing," he said, "was to carry the dignity of the flag, the name of the Somali people."

He won by 10 stately meters, ahead of Spain's Jose-Luis Gonzales and the U.S.'s Jim Spivey. Cram, exhausted, finished eighth. Bile's time was 3:36.80 (the world record is 3:29.46), but because the early pace had been bovine, the true measure of his race was his last 800, covered in an astounding 1:46.0. (When Peter Snell of New Zealand won the 1960 Olympic 800 in the same stadium, his time was 1:46.3.)

But what lingers in the mind is the image of Bile crossing the line, adding the incandescent white of his smile to the blue of lonely victory, happily bringing proud Somalia, for better or worse, to the attention of the modern world.

A man with no land on earth will have no land in heaven.
—Somali proverb

Somalia is the Horn of Africa, an Arabic brass ornament hammered over the northeast corner of an ebony chest. The nation has 6 to 6½ million inhabitants and 1,700 miles of coastline, along the Gulf Of Aden and the Indian Ocean, but only two rivers, both in the south. Wastes of flour sand rise to plateaus veined with wadis that are either dry or raging. In the north are the stark heights of the Golis Range. It was below these, in 1962, in the village of Taleh, near the town of Las Anod, which in the Somali language means "Milky Spring," that Abdi Bile Abdi was born.