Athletics: An athlete without a step wins the Race of the Noses… and skips the finish line!
Dominic Lobalu made an entry in the Race of the Noses, the fast, unorthodox Barcelona 5km race. He avoided the tape and entered from the left while the two volunteers looked at each other in amazement at his attitude. Then he picked it up and danced like he was a Brazilian after scoring a goal.
A party that in no way resembles the hardness of his life, marked by a very difficult past and a very complicated present that will surely prevent him from attending the Olympic Games in Paris, despite being a world-class athlete and residing in a country as advanced as Switzerland.
Lobalu is a refugee from South Sudan, who at the age of 15 began running as part of the team. which was promoted by the International Olympic Committee with Thomas Bach for the Rio Olympic Games and supported by World Athletics. He was an orphan since he was 9 when the war took the life of his parents. He holds all the national records of the troubled African country between 1,500 and 10,000. He wins Diamond League events (the 3,000 in Stockholm in 2023), he is faster than any of the Ingebrigtsens, he beat Henrik in Zagreb, but he made a serious mistake.
He fled to Kenya with his four sisters, from whom he was separated because he ended up in a male orphanage. Then Tegla Lorupe crossed his path, a Kenyan athletics superstar, who included him in the refugee team with which he participated in several top-level events such as the World Relay Championships in the Bahamas.
Escape from a Geneva hotel
He was writing his story, which must end in Tokyo 2021, but in May 2019 he went to run the 10 km as part of the Geneva Marathon racing program and, after winning, decided to leave the refugee team. They left the concentration hotel and stayed in Switzerland.
Before his escape, according to his Wikipedia profile, He asked his managers about the cash prize for that race, but they told him that there was no prize. He thought that his responses to him were evasive and that led him to believe that they were hiding something from him. “We had to accept what we had, whether there were cash prizes or not,” they told us. He disapproved of this idea.
Your peers share similar feelings about “growing tensions over their training” and cited “dissatisfaction with a system that, to them, seemed to deny them opportunities to create lives outside the program” as contributing factors to their dropout. The IOC and United Nations issued a ruling in July 2021 prohibiting Lobalu and Gai John Nyang – another athlete who absconded while in Mainz, Germany – from being part of the Olympic Refugee Team. They didn’t want any more escapes.
While a documentary about his life has just been published, his escape, his meeting with his new coach, Markus Hagmann, with whom he could not communicate in any language, his dream of being an Olympian is legally impossible at the moment. Switzerland will not give him nationality until 2031. The Swiss federation has tried to explain his situation to World Athletics so that he can run for Switzerland, but no one knows how to arbitrate a case of an athlete who is not from any country. Perhaps the latest efforts open a window for 2026.
