WHEN America’s best marathon runners lined up in New York’s Central Park yesterday to race for a place in the Olympic team, they included a gangly African-born runner whose stamina once saved his life.

It has been an extraordinary journey for Macharia Yuot since he fled the violence of his native Sudan in 1992. He completed the first 700 miles of his journey on foot.

He walked to Ethiopia to escape his old home; he now wants to run for the country that offered him a new one. He became a US citizen in August.

Yuot’s transition from foot-weary refugee to champion athlete has enchanted America. At 24, he is young for a marathon runner and although he has won six national track and cross-country titles, he finished yesterday’s race well behind the winners in 33rd place.

Yet the fact that he was there at all – having achieved an Olympic qualifying time in one of only two marathons he had run – has made him a celebrity in his adoptive home town of Philadelphia. It has also put a spotlight on the achievements of several of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan who came to America under a resettlement programme begun in the late 1990s. Another Sudanese immigrant, Joseph Lopepe “Lopez” Lomong, has become one of America’s top middle-distance runners, and in June won the national collegiate 1500m title.

Yuot is a quiet, shy figure who speaks heavily accented English. He prefers to let Vince Touey, his trainer, do much of the talking. But he speaks eloquently of the horrors he witnessed as a terrified nine-year-old whose parents sent him away with fugitives from the religious civil war that was devastating Dinka areas of southern Sudan.

“I tried not to cry,” Yuot said. “But when I saw other kids crying, I cried too. Some people gave up, and they died there. I saw people die every day. After a while it became part of your life.” He finally made it to Kenya where helived in a refugee camp for nearly a decade.

It was in 2002, after Yuot had been selected for resettlement in America and enrolled in a Philadelphia school, that he was spotted by Touey, the athletics coach at the city’s Widener University.

Touey said he wondered if Yuot was prepared for the gru-elling training. “The key to being successful in long-distance running is the ability to suffer,” said Touey. “When I first met Macharia, I wasn’t sure how much pain he was willing to endure, whether he was able to do suffering.”

Yet Yuot soon proved the trials he had experienced on the trek across Africa had hardened his mind as well as his feet. In yesterday’s marathon he set a personal best time of 2hr 18min for the distance.

Earlier this summer, Yuot returned to Sudan with a camera crew from the ESPN sports cable television network to be reunited with his mother and sister, who had not seen him since he walked away as a child. The documentary showed him stunned by the poverty in which his family still lives.

He has set up a charitable trust, the Sorghum Fields Project, in the hope of turning interest in his story into donations for the poor of Sudan. But yesterday was mainly about his own suffering, as he forced his long legs forward even when, Touey noted, “the body is sending signals: please stop”.

Yuot learnt a long time ago not to stop.

The Lost Boys of Sudan: American Red Cross page

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