By BRIAN LEWIS
Last updated: 8:08 am
July 3, 2008
Posted: 3:12 am
July 3, 2008
EUGENE, Ore - At six, Lopez Lomong spent three days running for his life through the desert to escape Sudan's Janjaweed militia. By 16, he'd survived a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp as a Lost Boy. And by last Christmas, he'd been reunited with his parents and gone back to visit a grave - his own.
When the Olympic Track & Field trials resume today, the adopted New Yorker will stand just three 1,500-meter races from overcoming his nightmare by realizing his dream - representing Team USA and his new country in the Beijing Olympics.
"It would mean a lot, coming from Sudan and raised all by myself. My goal is just winning the gold. This here is a dream for a long time," said Lomong, one of 20,000 Lost Boys who fled during Sudan's civil war to avoid being turned into a child soldier by the government-supported Janjaweed.
"I was just one of the Lost Boys; now I'm an American. I can compete for the country I want, payback to all the people who helped me. I want to say Thank You."
Lomong will run tonight's quarterfinal and hopefully tomorrow's semi and Sunday's final, vying with reigning 1,500 world champion Bernard Lagat and U.S. mile record-holder Alan Webb. That is daunting competition; but running a simple race must seem easy after the gantlet he's already run.
Lomong - a member of the Boya tribe - was just six when the militia stormed the church he was in and kidnapped roughly 50 children from his village of Kimotang, bent on pressing them into life as child soldiers.
He spent three terrifying weeks in a military camp, one of 100 boys thrown into a single room, fed a mix of grass and sand, beaten for simply asking to use the toilet. Some died of starvation, many of torture, others of dysentery. Death was not hard to find.
One night, three teenagers who knew Lomong came and helped him escape. They ran three days through the wild, dodging predators - both the animal kind and the militia - and walking hundreds of miles, hiding Lomong and at times even carrying him until they reached a refugee camp in northern Kenya.
