On September 10, 1960, Abebe Bikila won the marathon at the Rome Olympics in 2 hours, 15 minutes and 16 seconds, a world best. He ran the whole race barefoot. He was the first athlete from sub-Saharan Africa to win an Olympic gold medal, and the first Ethiopian to win any medal.
The barefoot part was not a statement. Bikila, a corporal in the Imperial Bodyguard of Haile Selassie, had been given running shoes by the Ethiopian team that did not fit and gave him blisters in training, and he had been running without them for years. He was also a late entry: he had been sent as a replacement after another Ethiopian runner was injured, and he was not on anybody's list of favourites.
The race itself was run in the dark, deliberately, because the Rome heat had been a problem all summer and the organizers put the finish at the Arch of Constantine and the last stretch along the Appian Way to make a spectacle of it. Bikila ran near the front. He took the lead on the climb out along the Via Appia Antica. He came in alone. The Moroccan Rhadi Ben Abdesselam was second.
What he did four years later has been used as evidence about him ever since. At Tokyo in 1964 he won it again, in another world best of 2:12:11. He wore shoes that time. His appendix had come out six weeks earlier. He became the first person to win the Olympic marathon twice. He ran the 1968 marathon in Mexico City at altitude and dropped out with a leg injury partway through.
A car crash in 1969 left him paralysed from the neck down. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1973. He was 41. He competed at the Stoke Mandeville Games for wheelchair athletes in 1970 and 1971, in archery and table tennis, and the stadium in Addis Ababa is named after him.
Bikila's two wins are usually credited with the arrival of East African distance running. The high-altitude training, the rhythm and the tolerance for very fast early pace that Ethiopian and Kenyan runners brought to international athletics in the decades after 1960 had existed before Rome; what Bikila did was make them visible.