The marathon men who can't go home...
The marathon men who can't go home... In the north Bronx, a small group of elite Ethiopian runners struggle to survive. The persecution they fled was far more harrowing.
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Over the past six months, the situation in Ethiopia has only grown more dire. Since November 2020, government-backed militias have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the country’s northern Tigray Region, whose people are fleeing by the thousands to neighboring Sudan. Those left behind are subject to rape, torture, and execution. And in Oromia, police are reported to be executing people in the streets with neither accountability nor cause. “Until the government changes, I can’t ever go back,” Tadesse says. “I fear for my life.”
Scattered throughout the Bronx, some two dozen other elite Ethiopian runners share similar arrangements to Tadesse and his roommates. They came to New York to compete for an unassuming club called West Side Runners, or WSX for short. A loose collection of mostly immigrant athletes from Latin America and Ethiopia, WSX has no corporate sponsor, no organizational structure, and no recruiting system. Since 1978, the club has been run almost single-handedly by a now-81-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer named Bill Staab. It’s open to anyone who wants to join, though its members tend to be self-selecting: people for whom running represents a viable path to the U.S., but who may not have access to managers or agents. Staab says he gets requests from countless runners a year. He can’t possibly help them all.
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Tadesse isn’t the only runner on WSX for whom deportation could mean death. Take the story of a 25-year-old named Urgesa Kedir Figa, who says he was detained in Ethiopia for three months, in 2016, for his family’s support of human rights. He says his uncle was killed by government forces. In prison, Urgesa says he was tortured at night with an electric cable. He has a deep, three-inch-wide scar that goes all the way around his left arm, just below the elbow, and a circular one on his right hip measuring five inches across.
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https://www.gq.com/story/ethiopian-m...ign=pockethits
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