Thank you for this interview Tim. Can you tell us a little about yourself and give us a brief background of your publishing experiences ? |
I am a British journalist and author. My first ever job was the BBC African Service but then fate took me another way. I went to cover the Balkans and now I am the Balkan’s Correspondent for the Economist magazine of London. I have always liked coming to Africa though and when I can, covering African stories. |
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Can you tell us a little about how many books you have published so far ? |
My Bikila book is really completely different from any of my other books. I have published a history of the Serbs, two books on Kosovo and in Italian, published by Adelphi. I have two collections of essays, the first from Afghanistan in 2001 and the second from Baghdad at the time of the American-led invasion in 2003. |
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Since the 1960 Summer Olympics, a lot of books and documentaries were published about Abebe Bikila. What made you decide to rewrite his biography ? |
Some years ago a film company asked me to research his life. They sent me to Ethiopia, to Italy, to the IOC in Lausanne, to Sweden and France. Then they decided not to make a film. Time passed and I thought it’s a shame that so much work had been done which was of interest to so many people, so I decided to publish the research as a book. I did not want it all to go to waste. |
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Who and what inspired you to come to the true story of Abebe Bikila ? And what is the true story of Abebe Bikila which we did’nt know ? |
As far as I know nobody has actually done any real work on Bikila, at least in English. His daughter wrote a first and valuable book many years ago and then there was another book in English a couple of years ago but much of that story was made up. A lot was untrue. I was angry about that. What was very valuable for me was not just that I talked to people in Ethiopia but also talked to the family of his trainer, Onni Niskanen, whose own story was extraordinary. He was a real adventurer and their relationship was key. Niskanen took ideas about running which the Scandinavians had developed between the wars and applied them in Ethiopia and bang-ever since Ethiopians have dominated the field. It was only in Niskanen and Bikila’s time that people began to understand the relationship between running at high altitude, stamina etc… |
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What were the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of writing this book ? |
| The worst aspect was that despite everything I tried I could not get to see Mamo Wolde who was in prison. It is a tragedy that, as far as I know, his tale, his part of this story was never recorded. What was best was this: I am actually not a sports journalist but what I liked about the Bikila tale was putting it on context. That is to say that Bikila was like a shooting star who lit up the sky at a time of such hope for Africa. And I loved finding the things that have been forgotten, that son many hundreds and hundreds of Swedes came to Ethiopia after the war, how Haile Selassie drew on links made as early as his visit there in 1924 ! What was perhaps best of all was finding Niskanen’s photo album preserved at Radda Barnen ; Save the Children in Addis Abeba. There were so many pictures of Bikila and Niskanen that no one had ever seen, some of which are in the book. |
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Did you ever visited Ethiopia ? |
Of course ! How could I write a serious book otherwise ? |
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