Ground

The most famous barefoot run in history was not a statement about footwear. It was a man making the best of a bad week.

In September 1960 Abebe Bikila arrived in Rome as a late addition to the Ethiopian team, a member of the imperial bodyguard, effectively unknown outside his own country. In the days before the marathon his running shoes fell apart.

The scenes between are imagined: an unfamiliar city, a shop, one pair after another tried on under the eye of a shopkeeper who did not share his language. What is on the record is the outcome. He found a pair. They gave him blisters. With the biggest race of his life days away, he took the practical option available to him and ran without them.

He ran at night, through Rome, past an obelisk that Italian troops had taken from Ethiopia a quarter of a century earlier, and finished in 2 hours, 15 minutes, 16.2 seconds. A world record. The first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

That is where the season starts, and I want to spend the rest of this episode on what has been done with it since.

For sixty-five years that run has been deployed as an argument. Every wave of interest in natural running, every minimalist shoe launch, every article explaining that footwear ruined the human foot, reaches for the image of an Ethiopian beating the world on bare feet through the streets of Rome. It is a magnificent image. It has been asked to carry a claim it cannot carry.

Bikila did not run barefoot because he had concluded that shoes were bad for feet. He ran barefoot because his shoes broke and the replacements hurt. That is the entire decision.

And then there is the detail that almost never survives the retelling. Four years later, in Tokyo, he won the Olympic marathon again, in shoes, and beat his own world record doing it.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole problem of this subject compressed into one fact. The barefoot version is a better story. The shod version also happened, and it was faster.

I want to be careful not to overcorrect, because there is something real inside the anecdote and dismissing the whole thing would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Bikila grew up and trained in a place and a time where feet did enormously more work than they do for most people reading this. His feet could handle a marathon on Roman pavement. Most feet cannot, and the ones that cannot are not defective, they are simply untrained. That is a genuine and important observation about what human feet are capable of when they have been used.

It is just not the observation the story usually gets deployed to make. The interesting thing is not that he took his shoes off. The interesting thing is that he had the feet to do it, and that took a life, not a purchase.

This distinction runs through the entire season, so let me put it plainly now and then spend seven episodes testing it.

There is a real and reasonably well-established science of what the human foot is and what it does under load. There is also, running alongside it, an enormous commercial argument in both directions, which has been going since roughly the early 1970s and which has cost at least one company several million dollars in a settlement. Sorting the first from the second is the job.

One more thing about Bikila, because he deserves more than to be a prop.

In 1969 he was paralysed in a car accident. He took up archery and competed from a wheelchair. He died in 1973 at forty-one. He was, by any reading of his life, a considerably more interesting person than the anecdote about his feet, and the anecdote is the only part most people know.

That is worth noticing on its own. When a practice needs a founding story, it tends to reach for a person and take the one thing it needs from them. The rest of the life gets left on the floor.

The second most famous barefoot runner in history has been treated exactly the same way, and her reasons were even further from the argument she got recruited into.

Next episode: the girl from the farm.