Where does the story start? In the back of a taxi. It's as good a
place as anywhere. Maurice Greene arrived in Daegu this week. He took a
cab from the airport and when he was done he gave the driver a signed
picture of himself. The baffled cabbie did a double-take, then handed
Greene a photo back, taken of himself 20 years ago when he was working
as a fireman.
The sorry truth is that sports journalists always
use taxi drivers as barometers of local opinion. It's a little lazy, but
when you spend your days shuttling back and forth between the stadium
and the hotel you don't get too much time to talk to the locals, and
cabbies tend to be more forthcoming than waiters and stewards.
A lot of people in the
athletics
community are as confused about what they are doing in Daegu as Greene
and that taxi driver were with their exchange. It's a pleasant but
nondescript sort city, 2.5 million citizens and an hour's flight from
Seoul. By coming here the IAAF are trying to take the sport to new
markets, but the flip side of that is that these championships are being
hosted by a country that has no great love for, or interest in,
athletics.
South Korea has never won a medal at a world championships, and it doesn't look like they are going to add to that tally in the next week.
And
yet, despite that, there is a Korean hero at these championships His
face is plastered on posters around the city, and his life story is
written down in leaflets piled up at the information booths. The opening
ceremony included a film of his life story. His name is Sohn Kee-chung,
and while he may not be well known in the west, his autobiography is
part of the school syllabus in South Korea. He died only eight years
ago, but his life is already part of the national mythology.
You may not have seen it, but Sohn is the man at the centre of
one of the iconic photographs of Olympic history.
It is more understated than the snap of Tommie Smith and John Carlos
giving the black power salute at Mexico '68, but just as powerful. It
was taken on 9 August 1936, at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. It shows
three athletes on the podium during the medal ceremony of the Olympic
marathon. At the back is the British silver medallist Ernie Harper. He
is standing tall, shoulders back and head held high, a proud smile on
his face. In front of him are two Korean runners, Sohn, gold medallist,
and Nam Sung-yong, bronze medallist. Their heads are bowed and both are
staring at their feet in, what they later called, "silent shame and
outrage". Sohn is clutching a young oak tree to his chest. Nam would
later say how envious he was of his team-mate. Not because of colour of
his medal, but because unlike Sohn he had no oak tree to cover up the
Japanese flag that was emblazoned across his shirt.
We remember
the 1936 Olympics for Jesse Owens and his four gold medals. Sohn's was
just as defiant a victory. And if history has forgotten that, it is
because it was many years before the wider world realised the
significance of what he did. Between 1910 and 1948 Korea was part of the
Japanese empire, who suppressed the indigenous culture and language.
The flags that were raised and the anthem that was played to salute Sohn
and Nam were not Korean, but Japanese, and the press and the IOC did
not award or record the victory as a Korean triumph, but a Japanese one.
Sohn was not even allowed to compete under his own name, but went by
the Japanese transliteration, Son Kitei.
"
Japan
produced three fine marathon runners in Son, winner of the marathon,
Nan, third in the same race, and Kohei Murakoso, the only man who could
give the Finns a race in the 5,000 and 10,000m," wrote E A Montague in
the Manchester Guardian the day after the race. All three men were
Korean.
During his stay in Berlin Sohn tried to tell the would
that they should not think of him as Japanese. He would sign his name in
Korean characters, and would often draw a small picture of his country
alongside his autograph. After the race he tried to tell the
newspapermen again and again that he was Korean, not Japanese, but his
minders refused to translate his remarks. Montague's mistake was
repeated right around the world, with one conspicuous exception. Back in
Korea the newspapers blurred the Japanese flag out of the photographs
of Sohn. The Korean daily
Dong-A Ilbo, which still exists
today, carried the photo – with the Japanese flag scratched out – on its
front page on 25 August. Immediately afterwards the Japanese government
shut the
Dong-A Ilbo down for nine months and arrested, then tortured, eight of its journalists.
Sohn
was born in Sinuiju, in what is now North Korea, in 1914, four years
after the country was annexed by Japan. In school he was taught
Japanese, and had to learn his own language in secret. He began to run,
racing against friends on bicycles, and when his teachers realised how
talented he was they sent him to study in Seoul. There he was coached by
Lee Sun-il, who used to make him run with stones strapped to his back
and his pockets filled with sand to help him build his strength and
stamina.
The regime worked well. When he was 17, Sohn won his
first marathon. And in the next five years, between 1931 and 1936, he
would run in 12 more, winning nine of them. In November 1935 he ran the
Tokyo marathon in 2hr 26min and 42sec, a world best, five minutes faster
than the time that won Argentina's Juan Carlos Zabala gold at the 1932
Olympics. The next year Sohn finished third in the Olympic trial, behind
his countryman Nam. The Japanese had made a lot of noise about how they
intended to finish third in the medal table. They were happy to send
the three Koreans to Berlin, a 12-day train journey away, to represent
them in the marathon, so long as they ran under Japanese names and in
the Japanese kit.
Zabala was the favourite for the race itself. He
led the field out from the Olympic Stadium, the 56 runners trailing in
his wake through the Grunewald forest. His fast pace meant he stretched
out ahead of the pack. Sohn, 90 seconds behind after three miles,
considered making a move to catch him. But as he set off he heard a
voice come over his shoulder. It was Harper, the Englishman. "Take it
easy," he said, "let Zabala run himself out." Sohn couldn't speak
English, but he understood the sentiment. For the next 14 miles he and
Harper ran together. And then, after 19 miles, the exhausted Zabala
tripped and fell. Sohn and Harper passed him. Staggering and stumbling,
Zabala dropped out two miles later.
Harper began to suffer with
blisters, and his shoes filled with blood. Montague wrote afterwards
that "Harper's performance, the last 10 minutes of it with a blistered
and bandaged foot, can vie with Owens' sprinting as the finest
performance of the Games." Sohn kicked on, racked with pain, his leaden
legs pounding the tarmac track. "The human body can do so much," Sohn
said later. "Then your heart and spirit must take over."
Heart and
spirit carried him up one final slope, back into the stadium and across
the line. As athletes always do, Sohn looked up at the scoreboard as he
finished. He did not see his name, but the Japanese transliteration of
it, and alongside it was not his nationality, but that of his nation's
conquerors.
Soon after the race the Japanese athletes held a party
to celebrate Sohn's victory. But neither he nor his team-mates were
there. Instead they were at the house of An Bong-geun, a prominent
member of the Korean nationalist movement. At An's house Sohn is said to
have seen the Korean flag, forbidden from use, for the first time in
his life. He was overcome with shame at the memory of being forced to
wear the Japanese Rising Sun emblem in Berlin.
After the war, Sohn
became the head coach of the Korean marathon team. Fourteen years on
from Berlin, after Korea had been liberated from Japan and then occupied
by the US and the Soviet Union, Sohn led a team of South Korean runners
– the first athletes ever to wear the Korean flag on their kit – to a
clean sweep in the 1950 Boston marathon. He was still coaching 42 years
later, and was in the stadium in Barcelona to watch his protege, Hwang
Young-jo, win South Korea's second Olympic gold in the marathon.
In
his own country Sohn was already a hero. But it took 50 years for the
rest of the world to acknowledge what he had done. He was an
instrumental member of the Seoul Olympics Organising Committee, and it
was only when Korea was awarded the Games that the athletics community
rewrote the record books. In 1986 Sohn was invited to a ceremony in
Culver City in California, where his nationality and name were changed
on a monument to Olympic marathon winners. Two years later he carried
the torch into the stadium for the opening ceremony of the 1988
Olympics, to a standing ovation from 80,000 of his countrymen.
"The
Japanese could stop our musicians from playing our songs. They could
stop our singers and silence our speakers," Sohn said before he died.
"But they could not stop me from running.
