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Behind the success of marathon runner Abebe Bikila
Ethiopian Grass Root Sports Chachi on Sports, Women and Yoga
youth
ETHIOPIAN GRASS ROOT SPORTS
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ports to us are a tool of social engagement, a tool to fight poverty, a tool to fame and fortune, a tool to keep healthy souls in healthy bodies, and a source of entertainment. We are at the cross road to tackle one of the biggest problem the country is facing “ youth development” with 50% of the population under the age of 20, youth development should be our top priority to tackle the problem.
I’m asking individuals, corporations, and government to step up and tackle this problem. Most of us who had a chance to live in the western countries have adapted the sport culture and became a fan of sport club. There is no ‘quick fix’ in a sports development program and it is our determination to reposition our Sports Development with emphasis on Grassroots. Our resolve to create a new platform to engage our young ones with a new direction to spot exceptional DREAM BIG APRIL 2011
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fitness and extraordinary gifted budding talents in becoming Elite Athletes within a very short time has become inevitable. As a responsive government, reviewing our strategies along these processes and fine tuning our pursuits with the initiative of ADOPT A TEAM AND FRANCHISE OPORTUNITY becomes imperative. Hence, this avenue to develop our youngsters through Private, Personal and Corporate Sponsorships, imbibing the slogan - “Don‘t change your destination when the hurdles get higher, just change the approach”. The Adopt A Team program is designed
to discover and Adopt a pool of budding talents (all below the age of 18 years) in the various sports disciplines, expose them to a scientifically structured all-year-round training program and get the whole project powered by sponsors - public, private and corporate - a PPP, Public Private Partnership sort of. We are asking to launch a pilot program in one city that would be used as model. The model would be used as a case study for future sponsors to evaluate the program so that they could partner up with us for a long time.
The Great Ethiopian Run 2011
Chachi on Sports, Women and Yoga Ethiopians know her as the gorgeous singer that emerged on TV dressed rebelliously and revealingly in stripped jeans and strapless tops. Though she seemed nonconformist, she always found a way to fuse the flag colors and Ethiopian elements into her music. People couldn’t help but eagerly wait for when she’d be on TV again.
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hachi was not just a pretty face, fans later learn. Her elegance is beyond the façade and deep into her heart where she finds the sincerity and compassion for the less fortunate. She gave concerts to raise funds towards supporting street children in Ethiopia and she founded her charity organization Hohete Tesfa to work towards the same cause. Today, about thirty years older and wiser, Chachi is still strikingly graceful and bent on making headway in the country’s artistic profile. Her company, Chachi International Art Management, is dedicated to enabling Ethiopian artists to penetrate through the African and world market by managing their careers, teaching them life skills so they can present themselves as wellpoised artists and by supporting their humanitarian interests in giving back to the community that hailed them. Having her own family and a young daughter to raise, where does she find the energy to do all this? Asks Linda Yohannes
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What is Yoga to you? Yoga is a set of exercises aimed at harmonizing the body, mind and soul. Our body is the machine. It is the flesh and the organs of our body - our arms, our legs and all that. Our mind is the part that runs the machine. It tells our arms to stretch and to pick up things, it tells us when it’s time to pick up our children from school and it is what makes us rush in the morning when we’re running late for work.
spiritual centers. Number seven is our brain at the top of our head, number six is our eyes where we see, five is our mouth, where we let out and speak, four is our throat where voice is produced, three is our heart, the central part of all our feelings, two is our stomach or abdomen where food goes to and one is our genitals. For example, teenagers have a number one Chakra that is so active and maybe their number seven (their brain), being so inactive and ignored. This is why they don’t listen when others tell them and they look like they are not thinking straight. Yoga is about harmonizing all seven Chakras - creating a solemn, calm and focused outlook for life.
And then there’s our soul. Our soul is who we are, our core and our identity. Like it says in the Bible, God made everything possible through his words. He said “Let it be light” and it was lit, he said “Let it be dark” and it was dark, his word is energy, a divine energy. Just like that, our soul is an intangible energy that connects us to each other and to the universe. Why does the earth grow plants when we put seed in it? It’s because it has energy. Our soul is a powerful center within us that holds the energy we need for life. A person needs to be in touch with their soul and if they are not, that will be disastrous.
Tell me about your practice of Yoga
In Yoga, there is a thing called Chakra, in the human body there are seven Chakra or
I practice yoga regularly, several times a week and I also teach it privately. I took Yoga
In Yoga, there is breathing inhaling with the abdomen filling with air and exhaling with abdomen falling. And then there’s stretching with poses for muscle stretches. There is meditation and focus. The goal for all of it is feeling whole and complete inside in spite of what is happening in the external.
teaching courses in America, one is called brain wave vibration (I haven’t yet taught that here because I want to start with high school students) and the other is Yoga teaching. I also work out at the Laphto Center and I just try to take care, you know – look after myself. Because ever since I was young, I hated it when I gained weight. I just find it so hard to move around like that. I like my body fit and firm. If I look at myself in the mirror and I look like I have too much extra flesh on me, I always couldn’t wait until I got rid of it. I have always been that way and that’s how I am today as well. Yoga, like I told you, is not primarily about fitness or losing weight. It is about harmonizing your body, mind and soul. So, Yoga complements what I try to achieve through exercising.
What have you achieved through Yoga? After I gave birth to my daughter, I decided to take time off and I didn’t work for four years. I had the time to reflect inwards and I felt something missing in me. I had been active in the music industry for more than twenty years. I was into singing, dancing, doing modeling and some acting. I also had a chance to take part in a few Hollywood projects and I was taking a break from all that. I felt that there was a calling inside of me, a gap that was unfilled. I started exercising profusely during my pregnancy and that was when I started doing Yoga. It helped me get to know myself better, be a better mother, work better and love better. DREAM BIG APRIL 2011
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few of the other runners sniggered when they saw Abebe Bikila turn up at the start of the Olympic marathon with no shoes. As a television camera scanned the scrum of athletes readying themselves for the starter’s gun, a commentator asked: “And what’s this Ethiopian called?” It was 1960, Rome. Africa was just shrugging off the weight of colonial rule and some sporting officials still doubted Africans were ready for the big time. A little over 2 hr. 15 min. later that myth lay shattered by the slight man wearing number 11, a member of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s Imperial Guard and a proud African whose gliding, barefoot run through Rome’s cobblestone streets announced his continent’s emergence as a running powerhouse.
Behind the success of marathon runner
Abebe Bikila 10
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Bikila’s triumph was all the more stunning because it happened in the capital of Ethiopia’s former military occupier. Legend has it that he made his decisive move in the race just as he passed the Axum Obelisk, a towering stela that Mussolini had brought back from Ethiopia as war loot. Four years later in Tokyo, Bikila won gold again, the first man to defend his Olympic marathon title. This time he wore shoes. For such a pivotal figure in sports history, not much is known about DREAM BIG APRIL 2011
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man himself. In Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila, former rock journalist Paul Rambali weaves a powerful narrative through a series of vignettes. The book, just out in paperback, makes liberal use of fictionalizing devices — interior monologues, imagined conversations — that render it less reliable as a historical account, but help to capture the drama of Bikila’s life. It’s hard to read Rambali’s wellpaced description of the Rome race without a rush of excitement and joy.
Bikila. Perhaps there is little to know. A poor villager who faithfully served the Emperor and was coached by a charismatic Swede named Onni Niskanen, Bikila left neither piles of letters nor much insight into his own dreams and beliefs. After his twin marathon wins, filled with hubris and alcohol, his body
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betrayed him. He failed in Mexico in ‘68, was paralyzed in a car accident and died a few years later at the age of 41. Two new books about the runner tackle in very different ways the paucity of behind-the-scenes substance and the absence of telling interviews with the
Tim Judah’s Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian is a more straightforward version of the same tale. Though Judah, a veteran foreign correspondent who knows Africa well, offers us plenty of solid reporting, his account struggles to overcome the dearth of rich source material even as it gets bogged down in some of the details the author has managed to dig up. At its best — in Judah’s description of the Rome race, and in providing context that explains the wider importance of Bikila’s victory — the book is a valuable addition to the history of running and Africa. But if you’re comfortable with a biographer cutting some corners and finessing some facts, then Rambali’s book is by far the more inspiring read.
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