Runaway athletes

Only chance out of poverty?

Muramagi sounds frustrated. But some big names in Uganda’s international sports arena; Moses Kipsiro, Julius Acon, Sande Bashaija, who have been speaking out against the vanishing sportsmen and women sound less keen to throw blame.

Some say for some athletes, international sports events are not just about competition; they present a real chance to escape poverty and instances of oppression. Each commentator is anxious about it for a different reason, it appears.

Julius Acon, who won the 1,500m gold at the 1994 World Junior Championships in Lisbon, Portugal and is among Uganda’s best ever middle distance runners, and a member of Uganda’s parliament recalls that when he began his athletics career in 1988 while in Primary six, he was poor and a perfect candidate for vanishing.

He was born to poor parents, and growing up in war-torn northern Uganda in the 1980s, he could have been desperate for any way out. But, he says from a young age, he had a vision of making it to the top.
Even when he was spotted at a regional primary school athletics championship in Tororo in 1989 and brought to Kampala to study at Makerere College School on a scholarship, Acon remained focused.
“I had a vision to run and go to school so that when my legs are done, my brain can help me to get a job,” Acon says.

He soon won another sports scholarship to the U.S. where he spent over a decade running. He once held the 800m American Collegiate In-season Record set in 1996 but he also focused on studying. Today, Acon is a graduate of communication from the University of Phoenix and an MP in Uganda’s Parliament.
Acon says although most sportsmen come from a deplorable background and use the trips abroad as an opportunity to run away from those conditions, it does not have to be that way.

“Ugandan athletes need to persevere,” he told The Independent recently, “When you work hard and shine on the global stage, everybody likes you but when you decline and fade off the sports circuit, nobody remembers you.”

Moses Kipsiro, a 2010 Gold medal winner in the New Delhi Commonwealth Games told The Independent on April 26 that athletes who vanish abroad lack career guidance and counseling. He says young athletes need to be given a clear development path.

“If they had that, then they would not think that it is okay to run away to earn a US$1000 doing odd jobs. “If they only became patient for two or three years, they would have the potential to win much more money.

Kipsiro says the vanishing acts are also down to the caliber of athletes that go out— are they competitors or merely participants? He was reacting to a question about why, it appears, Ugandan runners never vanish at international events.