The noise is the first thing everyone mentions. They can hear the hubbub as they wait for their race to be called, and it builds as they walk through the warren of corridors, towards the little square of light that may as well be a threshold between the here and the hereafter. And then, as they emerge on to the purple track, the explosion: an assault on the eardrums and eyeballs, the sound of a new and unfamiliar world opening before them.
Because there is a kind of parallel Olympics taking place as the track and field programme opens on Friday morning. While the likes of Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Sha’Carri Richardson stroll through the arena in a state of total nonchalance, dodging swarms of photographers, for many of the athletes taking part in the preliminary round of the women’s 100m, this is about as big a crowd as any of them will have experienced.
There are no medals at stake in this parallel Olympics. None of the 36 runners on show make it past the opening session. In fact, the very point of the preliminary round is as a kind of quality filter, safely herding away the least accomplished runners before they can bother the Richardsons and the Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryces of this world. In a way, these are the slowest fastest women on Earth. But they are all Olympians. And all of them have a story to tell.
Like Filomenaleonisa Iakopo, the 18-year-old from American Samoa who runs a national record of 12.78sec in heat two. A little cluster of volcanic islands and atolls in the south Pacific, the 77 generously-forested square miles of American Samoa do not currently possess a running track. “We have no training facilities,” Iakopo explains. “I train on the sand, I train on the grass, I train on hills. No rubber, just concrete. So, you know, not good for the knees.”
But the young sport-mad Iakopo was determined to make the best of things. And above all she was driven by a thrill to compete, at whatever level, at whatever she could find. She became a two-time champion bodybuilder, an orange belt in jiu-jitsu, a motocross dirt biker. “It can definitely be a struggle to stay motivated on such a small island,” she says. “But I want it to be a testament to other Pacific Islanders, Samoan women, that any dream is possible. I mean, here I am at the Olympics. I’m here. That’s what matters.”
The standard, as you would expect, is wildly mixed. Some, like Natacha Ngoye of the Republic of the Congo, are on the cusp of world-class pace. Others, like Sharon Firisua of the Solomon Islands, have a decent excuse. This is her first ever 100m race. She’s a distance and marathon runner by trade. But she failed to qualify by right, and although every country is guaranteed one place in the athletics programme, you don’t get to choose what event it’s in. So here we are. Firisua finishes in a time of 14.31sec: a massive lifetime best.
Some have come via the most circuitous of routes. Faiqa Riaz of Pakistan is a former hockey player and juggles her running with a job at the Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority. The 39-year-old Valentina Meredova of Turkmenistan is gracing the Olympic stage for the first time since Beijing in 2008. Regine Tugade-Watson of Guam is a former Navy officer who trained for the Tokyo Olympics by running sprints on the flight deck of the USS Iwo Jima.
But nobody has had a more fraught journey than Kimia Yousofi of Afghanistan. In August 2021, shortly after returning from Tokyo where she was the country’s opening ceremony flagbearer, the Taliban offensive began to reach the edge of Kabul. Her first instinct was to stay and fight. But senior security personnel warned her that as the most visible emblem of women’s sport in a country about to be overrun by a medieval misogynist cult, she would become an immediate target. “They just pushed me out of Afghanistan,” she remembers. “I went to Iran, and now I’m in Australia.”
How exactly Yousofi ended in Australia, where she now lives and trains in Sydney, is a process shrouded in mystery. She can’t risk naming the people who helped her get there for fear of reprisal. But she does have a clear message. It is written on the reverse of her athlete number, straddling the electronic timing tag: “Education. Sport. Our rights.” She now is safe, but the women and girls still living under the Taliban are not. She has teammates who have been kicked by Taliban soldiers while trying to train. “They don’t have rights,” she says. “They don’t count as humans. I just want to represent my girls in Afghanistan.”
Perhaps, for the smaller countries at these Games, the responsibility on each individual athlete weighs so much heavier. There are no second chances, no repechages, no other events. This, right here, on a breezy Friday morning in the Paris suburbs, is your window of opportunity, and if you miss it the pain can be unbearable.
Lucia Moris of South Sudan writhes screaming on the track after tearing a hamstring in heat one. Temalini Manatoa of Tuvalu runs a personal best in the final heat, but as she tries to speak nothing comes out. Her voice chokes, her eyes mist over. Eventually a team attache leads her wordlessly away. We never find out what the matter was.
And then there are the happier stories. For Xenia Hiebert, an English and PE teacher from Loma Plata in north-west Paraguay, finishing third in her heat and qualifying for round one has been the culmination of a long-cultivated vision. She had her day job, an education studies degree she forced herself to complete in a single term, and she was trying to train for the Olympics in a town without a running track. Like Iakopo, she trains on sand.
Paraguay is not, by even the most generous definition, an Olympic power. Its only ever medal came in the men’s football at Athens. And yet according to Hiebert, they still go mad for the Olympics. “It’s the biggest thing this year,” she says. “Huge, huge. This is the biggest group we’ve ever sent. My race was at 4.35am in Paraguay, and everyone I know was texting me to tell me they were up.”
By 1pm, the last of the preliminary runners have been swept out of the Olympics, perhaps for another four years, perhaps for good. But even to breathe this air for a few minutes, to step out and glimpse the lights and feel the rush of a packed crowd, can be the catalyst for something. Iakopo is off to university in Texas next month and knows that until she can knock the best part of two seconds off her personal best, the dream of a sprinting career will remain a blur on the horizon.
But now, at least, she knows what it looks like. “Of course my dream would be to run professionally,” she says. “To be sponsored by all these big brand names. I’m 12, and the professionals are running 10s and low 11s. I’m nowhere near that. But as long as I receive the right training, the right coach, the best facilities, I know I can get there.”
