The marathon life of the Rio Olympics' most inspirational flag bearer
It's one of those beautiful days you only find on the East Coast of Australia. Sky like milk and honey. On the starting line of the Gold Coast Airport Marathon, somewhere lost in the tightly packed crowd of more than 6,000 runners, Guor Marial's stomach turns.
On July 3, just five weeks before the Olympics, it's the last chance for any marathoner to make the Olympic qualifying time — 2 hours and 19 minutes. Guor won't tell you this, but he knows, this is the most important race he'll ever run. Not a single South Sudan athlete made the required Olympic minimum times, and if Guor doesn't qualify today, it appears there will be no South Sudan Olympic team. If he does meet the required time, he will be the team, one man representing an entire country in its first ever Olympics.
At 5-foot-10 Guor is unassuming, slight. He doesn’t look like an athlete, but he’s built for the marathon. His entire life has been a test of endurance — his childhood riddled by so much death, his own enslavement, his journey to the U.S. as a 16-year-old refugee. For the rest of the 26.2-mile race, he will be alone with his thoughts — everything he and his country have been through to reach this point.
A starter pistol pops. Guns … again. Guor’s pulse quickens, his long, thin legs glide forward. It’s liberation, but it is also terrifying.
The marathon pacers burst out in front. Berhane Tsegay Tekle, a tall Eritrean and half-marathon specialist, takes the lead. His job is simply to force the tempo and increase the chances someone will break the course record of 2:08:42. For a few hundred meters, Guor keeps them in sight, but his heaving heart pulls him back. Half way around the world, families flee their homes. South Sudan is once again tumbling to the brink of war.
Guor believes, with every bone in his body, that qualifying for the Olympics will help stop the fighting. For years he’s had the same vision: Maracana Stadium in Rio during the Opening Ceremonies. Thousands of fans are on their feet cheering. He walks, back straight, gait even, clutching the South Sudan flag with both hands. The image is so vivid, he can see the worn faces of his compatriots — members of all 60-plus tribes, together under one banner, tribal tensions put to the side, beaming with pride. He thinks: Money wouldn’t buy what I want to do for my country. As long as the flag of South Sudan is flying in that stadium, that’s all I want.
But now, as he passes the second mile mark, he can’t waste energy dreaming. More of the elite runners begin to pass him, one by one. Rubber slapping against asphalt. In their strides he hears footsteps, getting faster — it’s been like this his whole life, he feels the sensation of terror coming back. The memories spill out. He was six years old. Everyone was running in different directions. “The soldiers are coming!” they screamed.
Three different armies descending on their village, each fighting the other, and destroying anything in their wake. I was born in war, I grew up in war.
Along the raceway, someone is cooking. A barbecue on a sunny afternoon. But he smells charred bodies. His older brother was burned alive inside a straw hut.
He thinks of his mother grabbing him. He can hear her: “I don’t want you to die like the rest of your siblings.” They ran to the forest. Kids slept near the fire, while their elders made a circle of protection around them. After a month, they returned to where the village once was. The only thing left was memory.
It’s a comfortable 65 degrees on the Gold Coast, and the sun is beating down on Guor’s face. He makes sure to check his splits and keep pace with the Olympic qualifying time. The crowd of runners finally thins, and he finds his stride, floating above the ground, feeling as if he can run forever. Before the race, he met up with his compatriot Makuach Yak, and Zambian Jordan Chipangama, who were both trying to qualify. They made a plan to race together at a moderate tempo through the early portion of the race, then, like every marathon, at some point each man would run for himself, for his country. They wished each other luck.
When Guor runs, he lets go of his stress. But it is also the time he remembers things. He’s running for his country, yes, but selfishly he hopes the Olympics will help him forget. When he’s doing the thing he loves the most, the flashbacks can be searing — visceral.
He runs on, in and out of shadows, chasing and being chased, he sees their faces. Members of the Messiria tribe, from the majority Arab North of Sudan, standing over him on horses, like something from an apocalyptic nightmare.
After the soldiers destroyed his village, Guor had to fend for himself. His mother sent him to live with his cousin in Bentiu, the capital of the region. Each day at dawn he took a ferry pulled by a rope across the White Nile River, to search in the forest for fruits he could sell at the local market. The fruit was hard to find. On one trip, when he ventured further into the forest, the men picked him up at the waist and tossed him on a camel. Guor, a dark-skinned Southerner seen as a second-class citizen in this fractured country, became a slave. The Messiria took him to a camp deep among the trees. From sunrise to sunset he herded goats. I heard the stories. I never thought I’d see my parents again.
Back on the course, the ocean to his left, his black shirt and purple tank top soaks up the sun. Sweat forms in beads on his brow. He grabs a bottle of water from one of the volunteer tables and pours it over his head. For a moment, he feels the outline of the plastic bottle along his fingers before tossing it. When he escaped, a plastic bottle was comfort, it was the only thing in the world he could call his own.
His heart was beating so fast. It was Saturday in the slave camp, and the Messiria would be praying that day. Guor snuck out before dawn and met his friend Geng, who had been kidnapped to a nearby slave camp. For weeks, Guor persevered by holding onto the hope of somehow escaping and finding his way to Khartoum, some 500 miles away. There he had a well-off uncle who could care for him.
In complete darkness, with just his bottle of water, they took off running, hyenas laughing all around. At daybreak, they ran towards the river. I didn’t know what a clock was, so we ran against the sun. We avoided any place with a human being. We detour, we go back, we detour, we go back. We kept running and running.
The temperature is rising over the Gold Coast, now 70 degrees. Warm. The pace slows. Along the Esplanade, the broad avenue facing the water, Guor can see Mermaid Beach glittering to his left, and beyond that the Pacific Ocean, the far horizon.
For years, Guor didn’t know what to do with the anger he carried from being enslaved. There were times he could feel it in his legs while he ran, an invisible weight tugging at him. Now, he is running well but still behind the pace he needs to meet the required time of 2:19.
But this is an endurance race. He runs on.
At the front of the pack, Tekle maintains his lead, just ahead of Kenyan runners Peter Some and Kenneth Mungara. Mungara is the star, and course record setter. Spectators line up in droves to cheer him on, then clap with less enthusiasm as more runners pass. Guor wonders if any of them could possibly understand what this race means to him.
The flashes continue. He’s 9 years old, folding and scrubbing shirts in the river for government soldiers. After he escaped the slave camp, he returned to Bentiu, and found the only job he could get. I was so so skinny. They paid me in flour, My only goal was to see my uncle. He had no way to contact his parents, so he worked every day until his bones ached, simply for the right to wake up the next day and avoid the chaos destroying his country.
Sudan was in the midst of a 22-year civil war, one of the longest in modern history. The South, led by charismatic freedom fighter John Garang, fought the oppression from the government based in the North. But within Garang’s army there was dissent between the Dinka and the Nuer, the two largest ethnic groups in the South. Soon the two-sided war between North and South turned into a three-sided war, then multi-pronged bedlam. The South fought the North, Nuer fought Dinka, Dinka fought Nuer. Everywhere there was death. We were the same. We were cousins, separated by Colonialism. Racism between tribes deteriorates everything we have.
Guor never should have been in this race in the first place. A month earlier, at a race in Ottawa, Canada, around the 16-mile mark he followed one of the motorcycles leading the runners, but the motorcyclist took a wrong turn, and Guor followed. When the motorcyclist realized his mistake, he drove back to the point where he’d led Guor astray. Back on course, Guor ended up running an extra 2.5 miles, finishing the race nine minutes past the qualifying mark. If not for the motorcycle, he would have qualified easily. Friends told him he was unlucky. He doesn’t believe in luck — it belittles your hard work.
Now, he’s laboring, his pace is too slow. He spots his compatriot Yak just beside him. The presence of another South Sudanese comforts him.
He remembers that feeling. He’s 11 years old. He hugs his uncle, Marial, for the first time in Khartoum. It’s one of the best days of his life. He had hustled a ride from Bentiu, and his uncle welcomed him with open arms. Khartoum was beautiful. Sometimes when the moon was just right, it was reflected off the Nile and would light up the whole city. Soon Guor started the first grade. He was five years older than anyone else but it didn’t matter. Within a short time he learned to read Arabic and the entire world opened up to him. He could read the great Tayeb Salih, and recite Rashad Hashim’s poems. Words were magical. Words could become reality. Later he’d write on his wall that he wanted to make the Olympics in 2012. He looked at the words every day.
Now he feels lighter. He’s floating. He runs past one runner, then another. The air fills his lungs, his breath carries him forward. Once again he can see himself as a 12- and 13-year-old in Khartoum, for the first time he had stability.
Then one day, Marial, didn’t come home. His co-workers came by the house and told the family that security guards had taken him away. Guor felt his world crumble. His aunt went to the police station for help, but there was nothing they could do. His uncle had been accused of being a spy for the South. Security forces transported him with a group of men outside of town, lined them up in a large pit and shot them one by one. They heard that Marial was the first to be shot.
Later that night, security forces entered Guor’s house and cracked him over the head with the butt of a rifle, shattering his jaw, and knocking out his teeth. Guor was old enough to understand that Southerners could never live without fear of violence in their own country.
Once more, he ran, escaping with his aunt to Egypt, but there was so much sadness in their new home. How many different ways can your heart break?
Guor hits the halfway mark. For a marathon runner, this is the most significant part of the race. As you run through the first half, all your thoughts — hopes, insecurities, doubts — funnel together and meet at the 13th mile. There you begin to question yourself: Can I do this? As you continue, your thoughts once again fan out, and dissipate toward the finish line. Guor fatigues. He thinks about the months spent in Egypt, and all the times he was looked down upon or spit at for being dark-skinned. Now, he’s in his apartment in Egypt. The phone rings. He remembers the sound.
His aunt answers. When she heard the voice on the other end, she nearly fainted. It was Marial. He was alive. He’d been shot in that pit, but he survived by playing dead under a pile of bodies for hours. Bloodied, he dragged himself to Khartoum, then Egypt. It was amazing. We were in disbelief.
A few months later Guor and his uncle’s family were sponsored by the Lutheran social services and arrived at a place called New Hampshire.
For Guor this was a new beginning, but America was confusing. Imagine going from a land where you had to outrun hyenas and had seen your brother burned in a hut to being dropped off in a world of pep rallies and Sweet Sixteens. Skinny and missing most of his teeth, Guor settled in Concord with his uncle’s family. A city of 40,000 people with temperatures that drop to as low as 20 degrees below zero. The weather made his uncle ill and he soon moved his family to Florida. Guor stayed behind. Alone in a strange land, the community pitched in to take care of him. They were the village he needed.
Guor runs alongside Chipangama as his friend Yak fades slightly. He checks his splits. Now he worries — their time is slow. Well below the qualifying threshold. Maybe they’ve miscalculated their pace. With 10 miles left, he has to make a move.
His feet slap the pavement, just to his left, the Q1, once the tallest residential building in the world, shadows the course. He looks down. One foot after another. He sees the worn basketball shoes he ran in at Memorial Field in Concord as a 16-year-old. One foot after another. His high school track coach, Rusty Cofrin, wanted to see if Guor might be a good fit for his team and Guor took off. "I said, 'Wow,' this kid is floating," Cofrin said.
Cofrin found him running shoes, and within weeks he was one of the best runners in New Hampshire. Around the same time Guor’s older brother was killed back in Sudan. Guor buried his pain still deeper. He focused on passing the SAT. But English was more difficult than Arabic. Teachers encouraged him, they saw promise and asked him to stay after class for extra work. He took the test again and again and again, and each time he failed only to take it again until he passed. Any spare hours he had, he worked at the local supermarket bagging groceries, studying English, working.
His uncle wanted him to come to Florida. It was so confusing. Everyone was pulling me in different directions. Cofrin took him aside. "You need to focus on running," he said. "Everything you want will come from running."
But what did he want? He wanted peace, he wanted his family to stop dying, he wanted young people in his country to learn skills besides guerrilla warfare. How is running going to fix that? Nevertheless, he took Cofrin’s advice and continued to train. By his senior year, in 2005, he had offers from colleges all over the country, but he shied away. I was not confident enough to go to college. I still wasn’t sure who I was.
The same year South Sudan signed a historic treaty — The Comprehensive Peace Agreement — giving the South autonomy and the right to hold a referendum for full independence in six years time.
After the agreement, freedom fighter Garang, leader of the Southern army, was invited to Khartoum for the first time in two decades. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese, some reports say a million, lined the streets to bear witness to the man they’d heard so much about. When Guor was invited to visit Iowa State University, he remembers meeting a professor who told him that Garang had given a speech on campus years earlier. Guor’s face lit up. He accepted a place on the track team on the spot. Maybe running could give him what he wanted. A month before Guor started school, Garang died in a plane crash.
Guor looks at his splits. He waits and waits, he doesn’t want to make his move too early. He looks up at the sky. The blizzard flashes across his mind, streaks of snow. It was January 9, 2011, a year after his All-American career at Iowa State. The day every South Sudanese refugee and ex-pat was anticipating.
In the U.S., polling stations were set up in a handful of cities for the referendum on independence. Guor drove to Omaha from Ames under unbearable snow. The weather affected the station and he waited outside with over a thousand South Sudanese huddled together from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. There were two or three generations of people who had grown up in war. When he finished voting he walked outside and tears streamed down his face. He looked up as the white flakes blanketed every past sin and heartbreak. I never even felt the snow.
Guor pumps his arms, his stride elongates. Now it’s time. He dashes ahead, leaving Yak behind. He focuses on the next runner, picks him off, then the next, he’s flying. Chasing time. He feels the wind flowing against his face. He hears the South Sudan anthem, the words ring in his head.
We rise, raising flag with the guiding star
And sing songs of freedom with joy.
He picks off another runner, his chest out, then another. He checks his splits. He is now on pace for 2:18:38, under the necessary qualifying time — if only he can keep it up.
In 2012, he also made the qualifying time but had no country to run for. The South Sudan Olympic committee hadn’t been set up yet, and he didn’t yet have U.S. citizenship. Sudan offered him a place on its team but he refused on principle. New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen pled his case on the U.S. Senate floor, and five days before the Olympics he was granted a spot under the UN flag — he was running for the world. But it was too late to make the Opening Ceremony, and in the marathon he finished a disappointing 47th. But the race gave him purpose. The next time, he promised, he wanted to run for his country and his people. He returned to Arizona, where he trains, and pushed harder.
He passes another runner. He grabs more water and pours it over his head. Fans cheering along the Gold Coast are just blurs as he runs by them. Cheering, screams. Cheering, screams. The violence started again back home.
In 2013, the Vice President of South Sudan, a Nuer, left the government, and the President, a Dinka, accused him of plotting a coup. Soon Dinka were murdering Nuer in the street, and Nuer were murdering Dinka. It was happening all over again. Guor — a Dinka by birth — felt helpless. We have to see that unity is our greatest strength. But no one seemed to hear his calls.
Guor's stride is slowing. His mind pushes harder, but now he feels weighed down by his heart.
Two years ago Guor decided he could heal the nation. He believed a united Olympic team could show the country that they too can unite. He asked donors for $20,000 to help sponsor the team up until the Games. But after two years, he’d only received $7,000. To make up the deficit, he drove for Uber between training sessions — eight, nine, sometimes 10 hours a day. Seven thousand dollars became 10, then 15.
On the course, his legs wobble. How much could he take? Sometimes he felt like he was carrying the weight of over two million dead souls from the war, as well as carrying a nation’s future. He passes a park and begins to swerve, his knees almost buckle under the weight, the pressure. His friend Yak races by him as he veers towards a parked car. Yak slows momentarily, then yells back at Guor, “Do it for South Sudan!”
Guor steadies himself. He’s still on pace to finish below the required time, but his body is breaking. He runs another mile. Then his legs give out. His vision blurs. This can’t happen. His breathing labors, his blood slows. He sees flashes before his eyes. Flames. Every broken heart. He collapses. The sky like milk and honey.
Back in New Hampshire and Iowa, his friends had been following the online feed of the race. Every five kilometers, or three miles, his time would pop on the screen. After Mile 20 his times froze. Mungara would go on to win the race for a second straight year, by a second at 2:09:00. In total, 13 racers finished under the 2:19 threshold, including Chipangama. Guor’s phone was off, and 24 hours later his marathon time was still frozen online at Mile 20.
Where was Guor?
Two days after the race, Guor emerged — a picture on a Facebook page in a hospital bed, an IV attached to his arm:
Guor was released from the hospital and returned to Arizona. When he got to his sparse, one-bedroom apartment, he looked around. It seemed so empty. He didn’t know what to do with himself now, he had never thought about failing to qualify. What he wanted seemed so far away.
*****
Guor’s Olympic dream wasn’t quite over. Without a single athlete meeting the minimum Olympic requirement, South Sudan was still granted discretion by the IOC to select two athletes. The obvious choice would be Guor, but instead, two homegrown runners were picked — Kenyi Santino, a 1500-meter runner and Margret Hassan, a 200-meter runner who was recently featured in a Samsung ad. Not Guor.
At a minimum the South Sudan flag would be at the Olympics. For that he was grateful, and he emailed his compatriots to congratulate them, but it was devastating, and perhaps hurt as much as anything he’d been through.
South Sudan exploded the week after the race. Corpses laying in the road. The conflict splintered into tribal, political, and ethnic warfare. Guor watched in horror from afar. International news organizations predicted a full-scale civil war. On July 9, the capital Juba erupted in machine gun fire and tanks rolled through the streets. The UN estimates 287 were killed over night and thousands more fled their homes. "The unity of South Sudan is being dismantled," Guor says.
Part of him wanted to go there, and help restore peace, but what could he do? Then, nearly two weeks later, almost out of the blue, he recieved the news. He soaked it in once, then again. His face lit up. The IAAF, after reviewing his case decided he embodied the true spirit of an Olympian, and Guor Marial was headed to Rio.
"I’m going to be introduced as South Sudanese," he says in disbelief. "You see that? South Sudanese."
The fighting in South Sudan died down for now. On Friday all eyes from Juba, to Bentiu, to every South Sudanese refugee across the world will be on the Maracana Stadium during the Opening Ceremony. The South Sudan Olympic Committee agreed that Guor would be the flag bearer. His great vision now comes into focus — flash bulbs, cheering fans.
We rise, raising the flag with the guiding star
And sing songs of freedom and joy.
Flinder Boyd can be found at @FlinderBoyd.
